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The Religious Feeling. 



A STUDY FOR FAITH. 



NEWMAN SMYTH. 






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NEW YORK: 
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO. 

1877. 



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Copyright, by 
SCRIBNER, ARMSTRONG & CO. 

1877. 



The Library 
of Congress 



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Trow's 

Printing and Bookbinding Co., 

printers and stereotypers, 

205-213 East 12th St., 

NEW YORK. 



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CONTENTS. 



■ ♦♦»- 



CHAPTER I. 

The Question Stated. — The Transformation of 

the Religious Feeling 9 



CHAPTER II. 
The Feeling of Dependence 29 

CHAPTER III. 
The Feeling of Moral Dependence 53 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Perceptions in the Religious Feeling 106 

CHAPTER Y. 
Objections. — Verification. — Conclusion 140 



PREFACE. 



Lsr the struggle for existence which is ever 
going on in literature, as in life, a new book 
should show some variation, however slight, 
from others of its kind, by means of which it 
may be better fitted to the surrounding condi- 
tions of thought, and hope to survive for a 
season. 

The reason this little book has for its ap- 
pearance is a slight departure from the usual 
forms in which the evidences of faith are pre- 
sented, by which it is sought to adapt them 
more perfectly to the sceptical surroundings of 
thought in our day. The variation by which 
this new venture, among the great multitude of 
books, hopes to live and to be useful, may be 
said to be the result of a process of natural 
selection, in an American mind, from the Ger- 
man idealism, and the English positivism. 



VI PREFACE. 

The substance of it first formed itself in the 
author's mind during a season of quiet study 
of modern German thought, and he has since 
found the reasoning, which then enabled his 
own faith to survive, useful in conversation 
with friends whose scientific studies had both 
brought them into unwilling doubts concerning 
those spiritual truths which give to life its real 
value, and, at the same time, thrown the prev- 
alent proofs of religion out of all relation to 
their habits of mind. 

Though the principles unfolded in the fol- 
lowing pages have long been fruitful in the 
German literature of faith, and are evidently 
at work leavening the whole body of our own 
theology, there is no one book in the English 
language, so far as I am aware, in which they 
are consecutively and thoroughly thought out ; 
and even among the Germans, unless possibly 
an exception be made in favor of the excellent, 
but voluminous, philosophical writings of Prof. 
Ulrici, they have not been developed with suf- 
ficient reference to modern scientific theories 
of man's origin and history. 



PREFACE. Vll 

Faith in spiritual and divine realities may in 
some of its older forms be passing into Herbert 
Spencer's favorite family of extinct beliefs, but 
it certainly has had a marvellously persistent 
life in human history, and in new forms may 
prove itself able to survive vigorously even in 
the midst of those theories of evolution which 
constitute, undoubtedly, the general environ- 
ment of thought in our generation. That the 
following pages should contain a complete 
adjustment of faith to its new surroundings, 
would, of course, not be possible — the problem 
of life is ever greater than our last and largest 
thought concerning it ; but that they do con- 
tain a restatement of the evidence of things not 
seen somewhat more in harmony with the pres- 
ent condition of our knowledge, the author 
cherishes the belief ; that they may draw forth 
other and better statements, and help on the 
general movement towards a faith at once 
simpler, more rational, and more assured, is 
his hope and expectation. 

Quincy, III., June, 1877. 



THE RELIGIOUS FEELING-, 



CHAPTER I 

THE QUESTION STATED. THE TRANSFORMATIONS 

OF THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

According to the Gospel of the Spirit, 
Adam is the Son of God; according to the 
Gospel of the Senses, man is the son of an 
atom. The two genealogies become contra- 
dictory only as either is regarded as the sole 
account of the descent of man. 

The problem of problems upon which the 
thought of our times labors, inay be reduced, 
in the last analysis, to the simple alternative : 
Is man, through whatever intermediate forms 
he may have descended, the Son of God, or is 
he the unintended product of molecular forces ? 
If the former prove to be the true descent of 
man, then we are capable of religion, and we 
live in some personal relationship to a Being 
higher than ourselves, from whom we came. 
If the latter be the exclusive genealogy of 
man, we only deceive ourselves by cherishing 
1* 



IO THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

sentiments religiously colored. Our spiritual 
emotions, the bright and evanescent forms 
which come and go in the higher zones of 
thought and aspiration, are to be looked upon 
only as emanations from our lower and alto- 
gether earthly selves — the unsubstantial clouds 
of our mental firmament. Our chief end of 
life, then, would be to adapt ourselves, as well 
as we may, to our surroundings, and to sur- 
vive as best we can. 

It is surely not a loss, but a great gain, that 
in the discussions of modern times the main 
religious question becomes more and more dis- 
entangled from the minor perplexities of theo- 
logy. It is a sign of progress that the religi- 
ous question upon which the printing presses 
in these days are most busy, is not a question 
of sect or school. Messengers of reconciliation 
to-day meet each other from almost every theo- 
logical camp ; and few are the churches which 
continue to demand unconditional surrender to 
a system of bristling theological propositions, 
as a condition of admission to the household of 
faith. The question facing us to-day, which 
we can avoid only by retreating from the nine- 
teenth century, is a question of the very life of 
religion itself, a question between any theo- 
logy and no theology; between faith in the 
spirit and the Father of all spirits, and faith 
only in this visible order of things. 



THE QUESTION STATED. II 

The very attempts made by some writers at 
half-way solutions, or compromises, between 
these two antagonistic beliefs, serve to reveal 
more clearly the real matter at issue, and the 
inevitable line of conflict. Thus Matthew Ar- 
nold's " Literature and Dogma " is a proposed 
armistice between religion and scepticism, with 
which neither party could long be contented. 
The " stream of tendency which makes for 
righteousness," in the course of the Hebrew 
literature becomes too well defined, is deter- 
mined by too many metes and bounds in the 
descriptions of the prophets, and called by 
names too familiar in the language of Hebrew 
shepherds, to satisfy those minds to whom the 
Deity must be, if God is at all, an unknown 
and unknowable Power. And as Mr. Arnold's 
" God of the Bible " is too well known for the 
worshipper upon the Mars' hill of modern 
nescience ; so, on the other hand, is this " not 
ourselves which makes for righteousness, 1 ' too 
vague and metaphysical an abstraction for the 
believer in the temple of Jehovah, and the 
Shekinah of its holy place. Mr. Arnold, after 
his own dexterous manner, has performed the 
feat of the very metaphysics which he ridicules 
as a jugglery of phrases; for he has thrown 
another bridge of words between the two 
spheres of human experience, the world within 
us — our subjective knowledge, and the eternal 



12 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

order without us and above us, in which, as it 
were, our self-consciousness lies ensphered — the 
outward reality of God. "Literature and 
Dogma " is a bridge of words over this funda- 
mental antithesis skilfully put together — a 
finished piece of literary mechanics; but it 
only seems to unite opposites, and it will hard- 
ly bear the weight of either of the beliefs ex- 
pected to meet upon it. But religion is the 
way from ourselves, and our own moralities, 
to God, and His righteousness ; or it is nothing. 
And the " Zeit Geist," the Spirit of the Times, 
however ruthless of old sanctities, and icono- 
clastic of established theologies it may be, is 
by no means a light and trifling spirit, content 
to play at hide and seek among the masked 
forms of things ; it is an earnest spirit, at heart 
reverent of truth, and searching for its Lord. 
Neither unbelief, nor faith, seems disposed, 
then, to catch at the new phrase which Mr. 
Arnold, so much to his own satisfaction, has 
spun out of the old Hebrew faith. 

The power of Israel was a persistent faith in 
a law of objective reality ; in a Being whose 
word was a positive commandment ; and in a 
kingdom, unseen, but having foundations more 
enduring than the hills of Zion, and of whose 
sublime verities, altar and temple, and throne 
of David, were but types and shadows. And 
still the deepest currents of thought set to- 



THE QUESTION STATED. 1 3 

wards the reality which men believe to lie 
beyond their visible horizon ; and even our 
physical science pushes its discoveries towards 
the shores of the unknown land of faith. 

As a timid armistice between faith and un- 
belief, a compromise, like Mr. Arnold's, be- 
tween the lower and higher beliefs and forces 
of morality and religion, can, from the nature 
of the case, prove to be, at best, but a tempo- 
rary reconciliation ; so, on the other hand, is it 
equally hopeless for believers in the Bible 
and the Holy Ghost to seek to subdue the 
questions uprising in many quarters against 
the traditional faith, by clinging to antiquated 
methods of thought, or by standing still, 
marking time, in lines of defence which have 
been already completely turned. The oppo- 
nents of faith in revelation do not deploy 
their ranks now in front of Paley's formidable 
array of evidences, or within the range of But- 
ler's weightier arguments. The issue is 
joined on other grounds, and must be settled 
upon a broader field of discussion, Whoever, 
therefore, would run in the course of modern 
thought, and win the goal, must throw aside 
every weight which encumbers theology, and 
press forward in the spirit of the apostle who 
could forget those things which are behind. 
Faith has ever a nobler task than- to build 
the sepulchres of the prophets, or to stand 



14 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

guard over defunct bodies of Divinity. To 
let the dead bury their dead, and to follow the 
living truth which ever goes before us, is the 
Divine commission of the disciple in every 
age. Burdens of human interpretation, there- 
fore, too heavy to be borne, need not be 
carried by the champions of faith into the 
arena of modern controversy. Under clumsy 
and oppressive theories of God's method of 
creation, government, or revelation, he need not 
labor. To the main religious question of our 
times the Church may best go forth in light 
marching order. The believer may yield 
without controversy some once hotly con- 
tested points as now unessential. He should 
seize with his eye, and devote his energies to 
the few great strategic points of the Christian 
doctrine. 

Neither, on the other hand, can unbelief 
win the day by storming abandoned lines; 
by showering its shafts of ridicule upon be- 
liefs no longer held, if they ever were, by the 
Christian world ; or even by the defeat of 
detached doctrines, or capture of dogmas 
unduly advanced by theologians. He who 
would dispute 'the possession by the human 
spirit of its land of promise, must wage a 
better than Philistine warfare; mere raids 
upon exposed beliefs, the plunder, now and 
then, of an article of faith, will not prove 



THE QUESTION STATED. 1 5 

sufficient to disinherit the human heart of its 
birthright — the inheritance from the fathers 
to the children's children, with its fountains 
of refreshment and broad prospects — a land 
still flowing with milk and honey. 

The main religious question of our times 
concerns, first of all, the reality of our spiritual 
perceptions. Are we capable of coming to a 
knowledge of God, even if there is a God ? 
Can He touch us, and we feel Him ? Do 
we, by any valid experience, become aware of 
His presence, of the presence of real spiritual 
being and goodness without and above our- 
selves ? 

Our capacity, or want of capacity, for relig- 
ion, it will be observed, is a question of fact, 
which must be determined, therefore, as other 
facts are, by observation and testimony. The 
same methods which are used for the discovery 
of other facts of the creation are to be em- 
ployed in the investigation of man's religious 
nature. It would be in the last degree unscien- 
tific to shut out observed facts, or possibilities 
even of observation, by the necessities of any 
theory. A theory has served its purpose, and 
should be broken up, so soon as experience 
brings to the foreground a single form which 
cannot be drawn life-size within its frame. 
If man's moral stature should stubbornly re- 
fuse to find room for itself within the limits of 



1 6 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

a theory of natural selection, then science, un- 
able to dwarf man, must simply enlarge her 
Darwinian conception. The Baconian method 
would become a felo de se, a philosophic sui- 
cide, should it dismiss the possibility of a relig- 
ious nature, and the disclosure of truth to that 
organ of spiritual perception, on account of any 
theory of man s origin, or of the ultimate con- 
stitution of matter. The facts observed along 
any line of investigation must give the bounds 
to our generalizations, not previous generaliza- 
tion determine the facts. Science should be 
full of eyes, and travel slowly. The observer 
who spends days at the microscope may miss 
the grandest facts if he hurries at railway speed 
over the common moral experience of man, or 
across the uplands of the spirit. Yet we can 
hardly resist the impression, while reading, for 
example, Mr. Darwin's chapter on " The Moral 
Sense," that he has not devoted to the obser- 
vation of the facts largely written in human 
history which determine man's moral nature 
and descent, the same patient, scientific eye 
that has followed with close scrutiny the min- 
ute particulars which determine man's physical 
origin and structure. Writers who make haste 
to decry the want of familiarity on the part of 
metaphysicians and clergymen with the facts 
in evidence concerning the uniform processes 
of nature, should, at least, admit that the moral 



THE QUESTION STATED, I J 

order of the world, and the continuity of moral 
forces, may have impressed their signs and 
evidences as strongly upon the minds of those 
who have made their distinctive phenomena 
the pursuit of their lives. Clouds may envelop 
the heights, and darkness be over the deep 
places of the human soul. Prof. Huxley,* with 
David Hume, may think it wise advice to com- 
mit to the flames any " volume of divinity 
which does not contain any abstract reasoning 
concerning quantity and number, any experi- 
mental reasoning concerning matter of fact 
and existence;" but, nevertheless, there are 
heights and depths of being of which we can- 
not always be unaware, to whose mysterious 
influences, at times, even that stout-hearted pos- 
itivist, Prof. Tyndail, confesses ; and surely it 
would be ignoble for human souls to live like 
the poor peasants among the Alps, who culti- 
vate their few acres in the valleys in seeming 
indifference to the awful grandeur overshadow- 
ing them. And though we must climb of ttimes 
through the mists, we may have solid rock be- 
neath our feet ; we may gain a larger horizon 
than we dreamed, and have moments, at least, 
of clear, sunny certainty in the vision of un- 
seen and eternal things ! 

Our point of departure in the investigation 



'Lay Sermons," p. 145. 



1 8 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

of the religious nature, corresponds with the 
point from which physical science starts upon 
its voyage of discovery. In exploring either 
hemisphere of our double nature, we must be- 
gin with corresponding facts, and proceed by 
analogous methods ; and the experiences gained 
have similar claims upon rational credence. 
Our point of mental departure, both in science 
and religion, alike in physics and metaphysics, 
is feeling. 

Our knowledge of the external world is given 
in and through sensation. Our consciousness 
is affected so and so ; these affections or sense- 
perceptions are grouped in our several concep- 
tions of things; are combined, corrected, and 
held fast in various judgments and beliefs with 
regard to an external world. It is not to our 
purpose, at this point, to discuss the laws by 
which the mind advances from sensations, or 
sense-perceptions, to a reasoned knowledge of 
the world without, which presses in upon its 
consciousness ; it is not necessary to our argu- 
ment to decide whether, as Mr. Mill would say, 
a perception is only a transformed sensation, or 
whether, as Sir Wm. Hamilton would hold, sen- 
sation is the condition, or necessary form, by 
which the mind becomes conscious of outward 
things. The fact here in point is simply this, 
that sensation is the condition and the begin- 
ning of that knowledge which our science takes 



THE QUESTION STATED, 1 9 

for granted. We know the world by touching 
it. To that touch, to that feeling, and to no ori- 
gin less humble, science must trace back the 
lineage of its proudest demonstrations. Sensa- 
tion is the first stage of knowledge. The gen- 
uineness of the knowledge gained through our 
sense-perceptions is admitted by all with whom 
it is worth while to argue. The validity of 
our sensations, the worth of the raw material 
of science now passes current at almost every 
centre of philosophic thought, and it is never 
questioned by the multitude. Our knowledge 
gained through the senses is valid knowledge ; 
genuine on the face of it, and good so far as it 
goes. 

Is there, then, any corresponding basis for 
religion? Are there any religious ideas 
equally valid, worth all that they appear to 
be ? There has prevailed among men a 
general and persistent belief in an order of 
things 'other than that disclosed to the senses ; 
in a law, and purpose, and power, of which 
this visible framework of things is but the 
type and the semblance ; in an intelligence and 
goodness of which our minds, and all that 
our homes have taught us of love, are only 
image and reflection. As by the scientific use 
of the imagination Prof. Tyndall is led to 
believe in an ether, which he has never seen, 
or weighed, or touched, but which surrounds 



20 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

and pervades all objects, -as tlie necessary con- 
dition of material forces, the indispensable 
medium of light ; so, by an exercise of faith — 
is it any less scientific ? — the mass of men 
have believed in an Infinite and Omnipresent 
Intelligence, in whom we live, and move, and 
have our being — the necessary presupposition 
of all thought, without whom truth itself 
could not be, and light and darkness would 
be alike inconceivable. Does this general 
and persistent belief in the reality of God's 
Being rest upon foundations as firm as the 
grounds of our belief in matter, force, and 
ether? Does the use of the imagination by 
religion in the confession that there is an in- 
visible and moral Reality, from whom came 
the heavens and the earth, and into whose 
spiritual dominions they are passing and 
shall be dissolved, proceed upon the same 
true principle, and justify itself to the reason 
as the only sufficient explanation of known 
results, in the same manner as the scientific 
use of the imagination makes good its inter- 
pretations of the visible world ? Or is faith 
only a dream of the restless heart ; but the 
sight of the soul's own shadow, — the projec- 
tion, as it were, of its own vague shape, en- 
larging as it recedes, upon the limitless dark- 
ness ? 

This alternative, to which we come, can be 



ITS TRANSFORMATIONS. 21 

rationally met only by a close scrutiny of tlie 
religious feeling, and by observing whether 
under examination it conducts itself similarly 
to the feeling of existence, or the feeling of 
an external world ; whether in it, as in those 
affections of our consciousness, perceptions are 
involved; whether, in fact, the religious feel- 
ing yields, under all available tests, the evi- 
dence of immediate contact with moral and 
spiritual reality; whether it is the inward 
sensation, and its accompanying intuition of 
the Divine Being and presence; as on the 
lower and outward side of human conscious- 
ness, sensation, and its involved perception, 
come directly from contact with the external 
world. 



When we seek, for this purpose, to bring 
the religious feeling under investigation, we 
are perplexed by its constantly recurring 
forms, its evanescent character. But the 
variableness of the forms of any given force is 
now one of the first lessons of natural science. 
The sunshine, we are taught, not only lights 
the skies over our homes to-day, but also is 
stored up in the depths of the earth for our 
winter's use, not dead but sleeping ; for the 
glow upon our hearth is the resurrection of 
the light of other days. The great forces 



22 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

sweep through a vast range of effects ; all 
nature seems to lie open to the touch of a few 
master-powers ! 

The doctrine of the transformation and con- 
servation of energy has a role to play, hard- 
ly less important, in moral philosophy, and in 
the history of religions. If religion is one of 
the original elements of man's being, one of the 
great forces of human life, we must expect to 
find it under most diversified appearances ; in 
unlooked-for quarters ; at work in many forces 
that go by other names ; disappearing in one 
mode of activity only to reappear in another ; 
always continued and conserved in the play of 
the forces which enter into human life, and 
make human history. We may find the reli- 
gious feeling now glowing in the life of a saint ; 
now touching the lips of a prophet ; now mak- 
ing heavenly harmonies audible to poet's ear ; 
now opening the eye of a Raphael to beauty 
never seen on earth ; the religious feeling this 
moment may shine forth as truth, another mo- 
ment burn as a consuming fire ; it may blaze 
in a fanatic's zeal, or be the steady light of a 
thinker's doctrine ; and again it may lie darkly 
and unperceived, a hidden power, in men who 
know not what is in them. We shall find it 
not always active, but often latent in human 
hearts. It may exist waiting to be called forth 
in men who, because they have not recognized 



ITS TRANSFORMATIONS. 2$ 

its presence in themselves, fail also to under- 
stand its many mighty works in history. It 
has sent forth to do the will of God more than 
one Cyrus, who knew not by what power he 
was girded. If the religious feeling is a real 
motive power, an original element of human 
experience, from the very nature of force it is, 
and must be, a pervasive and manifold influ- 
ence ; and though its ways of action be end- 
lessly diversified, and its names be many, the 
science of religion may follow it, and recognize 
it, through a wide range of its transformations. 
We are not to assume, therefore, that it is not 
present in any soul, or among any people, be- 
cause certain familiar marks of it may be ab- 
sent. It was long before men learned to re- 
cognize the same force in the fall of an apple 
and the poise of a star. Not many years ago 
men would have laughed, had they been told 
to dig for the rays of the sun in the darkness 
of the earth. But we strike a match, and dis- 
cover that the black heart of the coal is a trea- 
sury of sunbeams. We cannot say that the 
religious feeling is absent in any heart which 
has not been so heated as to set free its latent 
forces. We cannot say that a tribe is incap- 
able of religion until, at least, a light has been 
struck among them, and their inherent capaci- 
ties thoroughly tested. There may be hidden 
much of God's grace where we see only hard- 



24 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

ness and sin. The blackness may yet be made 
to glow and shine. When a tribe can be found 
incapable of being rekindled by religious zeal, 
and Christianized, then it might be regarded as 
a proof of the absence in the lowest races of the 
religious nature. But no missionary has ever 
found a tribe incapable of religious education.* 
Man has, therefore, the power at least to become 
religious. At the lowest stage of his develop- 
ment, upon the most unfavorable view of "the 
primeval man," there is in his soul " the prom- 
ise and the potency " of the idea of God, and a 
distinctively religious faith. 

We are not warranted, then, in giving up the 
inquiry as to the real and universal existence 
of the religious feeling, of the capacity of the 
human soul for religion, because instances may 
be found in which it does not appear in famr 
liar forms, or even in which it seems to fail al- 
together. The person who imagines he is desti 
tute of it may simply be ignorant of the real 
nature of his own motives. Or the seeming 
want of it, in any tribe of savages, may be but 
the inability of the traveller to observe the 
same forces under unaccustomed forms, or to 
notice the germs of an experience which he has 
learned to call religion only from its full-grown 
fruits. It is easy to test the nature of a tree, 

* See Mivart, " Lessons from Nature," pp. 140-1, for instances 
in proof of this statement. 



ITS TRANSFORMATIONS, 25 

when its fruit appears ; but lie who says, there 
are no fruit trees in a grove, because he finds 
no fruit, may not know how to name the ten- 
der sapling, or the first green shoot. 

One other caution should be observed in 
the pursuit of the religious feeling through 
its ever-varying transformations. It should 
be remembered that, like other feelings or 
forces, it may exist in different degrees of 
strength at different times, and even when 
it is recognized, it may make itself manifest 
in changing degrees of vividness. The relig- 
ious feeling may vary in the same individual, 
like the feeling of personal existence, which is 
by no means a constant element; for it 
changes with health ; it runs low in sickness ; 
it is suspended in sleep, or stirs vaguely in 
the dreamer's consciousness ; or it is capable 
of sudden increase of intensity, and every 
nerve may thrill with it. It is the nature of 
everything living to be variable ; life is possi- 
ble only in an unstable organism,* whose atoms 
are in perpetual motion; only death is still- 
ness. If we would persuade, then, this sensi- 
tive witness to reveal its secret, and discover 
what is really in it, we must not be content to 
take it in its worst hours, or in its feeblest 
motion, but we must catch it, and study it, as 



* Balfour Stewart's " Conservation of Energy," pp. 164, 188, 

2 



26 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

we do any other feeling, as we do magnetism, 
not merely at its lowest, in its unexcited con- 
ditions, but also at its height, in its brightest 
glow. To observe the capacity for religion, 
to reason from the religious feeling in men, or 
among people, who manifest but a low degree 
of religious activity, would be as unscientific 
as it would be to study gravitation only in a 
body at rest, or the nature of light at mid- 
night. We may learn something of gravita- 
tion from an inert stone, something of light 
from the shadows, something concerning re- 
ligion even from worldlings and savages ; but 
we have to account for bodies in motion, as 
well as at rest ; for the noon, as well as the 
twilight ; for Judea as well as Philistia ; and 
from the highest moments and grandest 
hours of moral as well as of physical forces, 
we may learn to understand aright their 
nature and laws, and to infer their presence 
where we can see perhaps only equilibrium or 
indifference. 

There is undoubtedly in the study of reli- 
gion, as of every developed organism, much 
to be learned from inquiry into the germi- 
nant forces, the earliest traces of it, in the 
world's childhood. The value of embryology, 
indeed, to the right classification of organic 
forms every naturalist would emphasize, and 
the embryology of religious growth is equally 



ITS TRANSFORMATIONS. 2 J 

indispensable to comparative theology. But 
embryology is valuable in science, and in re- 
ligion, chiefly as it throws light upon devel- 
oped structural distinctions. Differences are 
1 not accounted for simply by reducing them to 
their lowest terms. Life is not explained by 
reducing it to its minimum in an egg. The 
question is, what made two eggs of similar 
appearance develop into two unlike types? 
Differences must be accounted for at their 
points of greatest as well as of least diver- 
gence, in any scientific conception of species. 
So the religious feeling must be studied and 
explained not only in the rudimentary forms 
of it which approach most nearly other feel- 
ings, but also in the most perfect developments 
of it which differentiate it from all other feel- 
ings. What is there in it which causes it to 
develop into a peculiar species ? What is 
there in it which, after a short process of 
growth, makes it a feeling distinct by itself ? 

The parabola, at the beginning of its curva- 
ture, may seem to coincide with the arc of a 
circle ; but there must be a difference in the 
impulses which generate the two curves, for 
soon the latter returns into itself, while the 
other has measureless sweep ; so the religious 
feeling may appear, in its first moments, to 
be identical with certain lines of experience 
which only take in the things of this world in 



28 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

their little circle, and soon return into them- 
selves ; but it quickly shows itself to be of 
larger impulse, for the religious spirit cannot 
be satisfied with the possession of the things 
which are seen, and it reaches out tow r ards the 
Infinite. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 

Human progress is always the resultant of 
conflicting forces. Our age is moved by oppo- 
site tendencies, but the real line of advance 
will be found to be the resultant of them all. 
The present tendency of thought is strongly 
in the direction of the physical sciences, but 
there is also a constant impulse to return to 
metaphysical problems. Even our men of 
science cannot resist always the temptation to 
become metaphysicians, and to reason concern- 
ing causes never caught in their crucibles, or 
detected in their laboratories. In fact physics 
leads as directly to metaphysics as the shadow 
leads up to the substance ; and no thoughtful 
mind can pursue any path of investigation far 
without coming out in view of the great ques- 
tions of theology. It is not surprising, there- 
fore, that the century which has witnessed 
rapid advance in science, has also been alive 
with philosophical and theological energy. 

There are human experiences which lie be- 
yond the range of the senses, as there are in- 



30 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

fluences subtle, but real, and known in their 
wonderful effects, on either side the colors 
of the solar spectrum. And there have 
arisen, within the century, not a few pro- 
found students of this outlying side of human 
knowledge, these mental and moral influences 
which, though imponderable forces, have had 
much to do, more perhaps than we can know, 
in forming human history. The very age in 
which natural science has grown to be an ab- 
sorbing passion ; in which physiology has risen 
to the dignity of a branch of mental philoso- 
phy ; in which the story of man's origin and 
destiny is read from the records of the rocks, 
and from the secrets of the stars ; this very 
age of the successful pursuit of the physical 
sciences began in a new, widespread, and pro- 
found philosophical movement ; and more un- 
observed, perhaps, but no less earnest and 
eager for the truth has been the study of the 
testimony of the human soul to itself— its reve- 
lation and prophecy of its own being and life. 
Towards the beginning of the present cen- 
tury a general philosophical interest was reviv- 
ed in Germany; and each of the leading facul- 
ties of which we find ourselves possessed had its 
recognized advocate and school. Representa- 
tives, so to speak, of the four quarters of the 
world of human consciousness met, and held 
high debate in Berlin. Wolf, and the " Ilium- 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE, 3 1 

inists," advanced the claims of the understand- 
ing, and maintained that truth is a matter of 
logic, and clear statement. But a philosophy 
which -laughed at enthusiasm, and which would 
admit as real only that which it could drag 
into the common light of day ; a philosophy 
which sought to possess every realm of thought 
and even to enter the kingdom of God by the 
syllogism, soon provoked a reaction ; — there 
were powers from the hills which could not 
be brought so easily under the rule of the 
plain. Lessing revolted from the bare-faced 
Illuminism, no less than from the soulless Or- 
thodoxism of his day. But Immanuel Kant 
introduced a new era. Kant was the John 
the Baptist of modern philosophy. He came 
with a mighty call to repentance to philoso- 
phical Pharisees and hypocrites. He repre- 
sented an essentially Judaistic tendency of 
thought, for he proclaimed, with the voice of a 
prophet, the imperative of the law. He re- 
duced religion to conscience, and as of the 
Baptist so of him it may be said : " He that is 
least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than 
he." * 

But the pride of the intellect rebelled 
against the menial service to which Kant 



* Ullmaim, " Das Wesen des Christenthums," pp. 49, 50, justly 
says that in this preparatory work of Kant consists its importance, 
and at the same time its insufficiency. 



32 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

had subjected it. The pure reason, Kant had 
insisted, could learn nothing of the realities of 
being ; the office of the reason is to serve, not 
to rule ; let the practical understanding govern 
life ; duty is bondage to the stern imperative 
of the law. Then Hegel stood forth to repre- 
sent the power of pure thought, and for a sea- 
son he upheld the prerogative of the reason 
to universal dominion. Religion, which in 
the shallow age of the Illuminists was evapor- 
ated, so that only a dry morality was left as 
its sediment ; which, in \h^ sterner system of 
Kant, had been confined within the limits of 
unyielding commandments — the very fountain 
of life held bound in a narrow rocky course — 
in the pantheism of Hegel seemed finally to 
lose itself in that boundless speculation, where 
all is fluid, and in motion, and distinctions 
emerge only to disappear in the ebb and flow 
of the universal thought-process. In the He- 
gelian philosophy Thought is the great High 
Priest, whose office it is perpetually to make 
the finite and the Infinite one, to reconcile con- 
tradictions, and to realize God in humanity. 
But the same philosopher who exalted Thought 
to be priest and king, died complaining that 
none of his disciples understood him ; and the 
mediation of the pure reason did not leave 
human hearts believing in the friendship of 
God. From Hegel's philosophy one of the 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. $$ 

chief beatitudes was wanting, for among his 
disciples the poor in spirit do not inherit the 
kingdom of God.* 

When it became evident that men were fail- 
ing by these ways to enter the kiogdom of 
God ; that the syllogism of Wolf was not the 
key to it ; that the will of Kant could not 
take it by violence ; that the speculative rea- 
son of Hegel could not overleap its walls ; 
there was but one other way left, a way of low- 
ly entrance, but when once entered a straight 
path ; and to Frieclrich Schleiermacher belongs 
the praise of having found for the philosophy 
of his time that overgrown gateway, and 
having led the thought of his age into the 
true way of approach towards God. Schleier- 
macher not only made religion respectable in 
Berlin by his famous discourses, but he vindi- 
cated in philosophy the place and authority 
of man's religious nature. He met the vulgar 
rationalism of his day by compelling reverence 
to the immediate revelation of the Divine 
through the religious feeling ; and whoever 
goes down with Schleiermacher to that sense 
of dependence in which he found the lowly 
source of religion, goes beneath all rational- 
ism, and cannot deny henceforth the presence 
of the Holy Ghost. 



* Kraus, " Lehre von der Offenbarung," p. 29. 
2* 



34 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

That Schleiercnacher himself did not follow, 
without sometimes wandering, his own better 
way, that he himself became at times, envel- 
oped in a misty pantheism, can indeed hardly 
be denied. It is rarely given to a reformer or 
to a thinker whose idea is, as the Germans say, 
an epoch-making idea, to reap the full harvest 
from his upturning of the soil, the fruit of his 
own germinant thought. Schleiertaacher left 
his fruit largely in the seed, but growing. 
His followers must show more completely than 
he did the relation of the religious feeling to 
other elements of man's complex being, and 
particularly the manner in which, through the 
feeling of absolute dependence, we come to 
the knowledge of God. But as Schleier- 
macher sacrificed a lock to the shade of 
Sj3inoza, so it is fitting that a lock should first 
be sacrificed to the shade of Schleiermacher 
by him who, amid the reasonings of our natu- 
ral science, and the perplexities of unbelief, 
searches in thirst of soul for a life which is 
more and better than the dust of the earth. 

The perennial source of religion, opened 
afresh in every new-born soul, is the feeling of 
absolute dependence. We feel our depend- 
ence as we come to feel our own existence. 
We have not made ourselves, we found our- 
selves in existence ; and our earliest, and our 
latest, our only consciousness of ourselves is a 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 35 

consciousness of dependent being. This sense 
of dependence which, we find to be an integral 
part of our consciousness of existence is not 
merely a feeling of limitation by outward 
objects, or of their resistance to our wills ; it 
is a consciousness of absolute dependence for 
our existence, and our individuality, upon 
something not ourselves, and not the world 
which, like ourselves, is finite and of which we 
perceive ourselves to be a part.* We bring 
ourselves into subjection, and become partial 
masters at least of the outward world; our 
dej3endence upon that we feel to be but lim- 
ited ; often in f acir, and always in thought, we 
may rise superior to it ; but we feel our de- 
pendence upon something other than ourselves 
and the things that appear, over which we 
have no power even in thought, and with 
regard to whose orderings we have no will 
but to obey. This is the religious feeling in 
its simplest form,' the feeling of absolute de- 
pendence. 

The book of Genesis betrays a deep knowl- 
edge of the manner in which man came, and 
perhaps every new-born child must still come 
to the knowledge of himself and his personal 
superiority to finite objects, when it represents 
Adam as at once, after his creation, giving their 



; Schleiermacher, " Der Christiche Glaube," § 32, 2. 



36 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

names to things. If we cannot exercise lord- 
ship in any other way over material objects, at 
least we can throw over them the lines of lan- 
guage, which go forth throughout all the earth, 
and show our personal prerogative over nature 
by giving to everything its name. But there 
is a nameless Power. The words in which, 
from the hymns of our Aryan ancestors to the 
last prayer of faith, men have tried to utter 
His name, are so many confessions of our ina- 
bility to find any one word by which He may 
be declared — as we represent all finite things 
by their proper names. Our very words for 
God ever varying, no one satisfying the feeling 
which calls it forth, betray our absolute depend- 
ence upon the Infinite One. He must declare 
Himself unto us before we can know Him in 
the speech of men. He must reveal His own 
name that we may worship no more at the 
altar of the unknown God, but offer the prayer, 
Our Father which art in Heaven. 

We are not discussing here the possibility 
or the fact of a special revelation, but I simply 
adduce this feeling — which we do not have 
concerning anything in the world, or the mate- 
rial universe as a whole, that we cannot give 
it a name, but that it must name itself to us, 
or remain unknown ; but which we do have 
towards Deity — as an indication of the dis- 
tinction between our consciousness of partial 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 37 

dependence upon the world, and our absolute 
dependence upon the Infinite God. The three 
feelings — the sense of self, of the world sur- 
rounding self, and of the Being upon whom 
self and the world are alike dependent, coexist 
in our minds; are developed perhaps by the 
same experiences ; never are wholly separated 
in our actual consciousness, but are distinct and 
co-ordinate feelings. And the fact that upon 
the lips of men like Spencer and Tyndall 
these phrases are repeatedly found : " The Un- 
known Cause," "The Unseen Reality," " The 
Ultimate Existence," * " The Inscrutable 
Power," f show plainly that it is not to be the 
mission of scientific knowledge to expurgate 
our consciousness of this most human feeling. 
Man neither created this feeling out of noth- 
ing in his own soul, nor reached it first by re- 
flection. We have always been possessed by 
it since we came to ourselves in self-conscious 
life. It may have been in the first infantile 
feeling of existence, uttered in the first cry of 
life from the womb ; it is certainly with us, a 
vague sense of dread, a sometimes oppressive 
consciousness of our finiteness, when we think 
of ourselves — who we are, whence we came, 
and whither we go. We do not succeed in 



* " First Principles," pp. 123, 117. 

f Pop. Sci. Monthly, art. Fermentation, Dec, 1876, p. 154. 



38 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

banishing our helplessness by all our conquests 
over matter and force. On the contrary, the 
knowledge of our personal insignificance grows 
•with our growth, and the wisest are as little 
children. The more self-contained and masters 
of ourselves we become, the more deeply con- 
scious do we grow of the limits to our being 
and our will fixed at the j)oints of contact be- 
tween ourselves and the Being who measures 
the span of our years. Our very independ- 
ence of nature and sense of superiority, in- 
creasing with every discovery of science, over 
the world, of w x hose dust— gathered perhaps 
from all worlds — we are fashioned, serves only 
to deepen our profound feeling of dependence 
upon the Power that holds us and all the 
spheres in the hollow of its hand. 

Thought itself, to which Hegel declared the 
secret of the universe is open, and which has 
learned the language of the messengers of light 
from other worlds, and listens to their story 
of the structure of the stars, still is baffled by 
the mystery of existence which is older than 
the things which do appear, and cannot break 
the silence of the eternal Mind. In thought, 
most kingly prerogative of our natures, never- 
theless, we feel ourselves to be but servants, 
and we must wait and watch for the disclosures 
of the wisdom which is higher than we. Truth 
is always a discovery, and the joy of its posses- 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 39 

sion is the joy of one who finds a pearl of 
great price. Our best thoughts come as sur- 
prises of light to us ; not as our own creations, 
but as visions and revelations of the truth, 
which no man calls his own, for it is before 
all men. " Man," remarks Cousin, " may say, 
1 My reason ; ' but give him credit for never hav- 
ing said, ' My truth.' " Our minds have no pow- 
er to make a single truth what it is; and we 
feel in every effort and triumph of thought that 
our reasons are absolutely dependent upon 
the truth, which in part we can perceive, but 
not one jot or tittle of which do we create; for 
it is before us, and. speaks with authority to 
all finite minds. 

As we neither lay aside with our growth 
the feeling of absolute dependence, nor in our 
moments of highest intellectual attainment are 
freed from the horizon line of our finite vision ; 
so, also, in the moments of most decisive action, 
when we act with the most conscious freedom, 
we never lose the sense of our dependence, 
Rather, great men seem to be called to their 
noblest endeavors as by the voice of destiny 
they who lead their age to memorable advan- 
ces themselves seein to follow, as though im- 
pelled by a purpose into whose mighty move 
ment their lives are taken up and carried on 
often to grander issues than they dreamed ; and 
they who work works that remain on earth 



4-0 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

serve humbly, and do the will of a better 
thought, and a larger Providence Hence it is 
that heroic actors in human history have been 
burdened with a sense of responsibility to a 
Divine Power whose decrees they were com- 
missioned to fulfill. Nothing great, heroic, and 
enduring has been achieved in history except 
in this humble and reverent feeling of depend- 
ence upon Him whose will is to be done on 
earth as in Heaven. Constan tine's vision of the 
cross before his victory, whether fable or fact, 
represents the consciousness of a Divine com- 
mission, and a Divine promise, in which the 
great and enduring triumphs of Christian civ- 
ilization, have been won. Faith in a higher 
law to be fulfilled in human history has been 
the vital principle and fruitful power of hu- 
man progress from the clays of old, when 
Abraham went forth to found a nation, to 
President Lincoln's proclamation of emancipa- 
tion, and to the death of the last martyr to 
liberty. Frederic the Great presaged coming 
victory when one of his columns marched by 
singing one of Luther's psalms ; and as he 
reviewed his own career he acknowledged that 
his battles seemed to have been decided for 
him by a higher power. And even the first 
Napoleon, who believed that Providence is al- 
ways on the side of the strongest battalions, 
learned in a life of exile to confess that there 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 4 1 

is a kingdom of Divine love more enduring 
than the conquests of human might. Man, 
then, in his freest action, as in his highest 
thought, feels his absolute dependence. Hu- 
man freedom is itself a Divine decree. 

The feeling of absolute dependence, then, is 
the earliest, most general form of the religious 
feeling. It is the feeling, inseparable from 
the sense of existence, of the reality in which 
we live, and move, and have our being. In 
short, as a circle is not only a centre, but also 
a circumference, and centre and circumference 
must coexist to complete the circle; so our 
personal consciousness is not merely the cen- 
tral sense of self, but also, and at the same 
time, the sense of a being circumscribed and 
limited ; the generating point, so to speak, of 
personal consciousness is the ego, the indivisi- 
ble self ; but the circumference touches the 
Infinite, from which we, in our little life, are 
measured off, but in which, nevertheless, we 
are, and out of whose all-encompassing pres- 
ence we can never escape. Always around 
the soul's horizon line is — God. 

An interesting, though obscure field of in- 
vestigation is opened by the question, "What 
are the physical antecedents, or natural proc- 
esses by means of which man comes to this 
consciousness of himself as a free, but depend- 
ent being? It is altogether possible that in 



42 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

the quiet of the womb, and during the unre- 
membered hours of infancy, there may begin, 
also, the growth of a germinant soul, indi- 
vidualizing itself by its inherent power, as 
the members of its body are formed, and 
giving shape to its outward organism. The ' 
first indications of conscious, intelligent life 
in the child suggest the idea, not of a soul 
completely individualized, but of a soul com- 
ing to itself, in the process of formation ; all 
its powers — physical, intellectual, and spiritual 
— working together towards the type of man. 
And the fact, established by the observation 
of the naturalists, that the period of human 
infancy is prolonged much beyond the time 
required by the young of the higher animals 
to provide for themselves, is suggestive, to 
say the least, of some special retarding influ- 
ence over the early development of man. 
Prof. Fiske, in his " Cosmic Philosophy," 
finds the cause for this phenomenon of pro- 
longed human infancy in the greater com- 
plexity and specialty of the nervous connec- 
tions in the human brain. But this very 
complexity and specialty of structure may 
be the effect of a cause operative only in 
man; and the supposition of a higher cause — 
the growth of a soul— yields at once the ade- 
quate explanation of this, as of those other 
differences between man and the brute, which 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 43 

are not uncovered, indeed, by the scalpel of 
the anatomist, but which are revealed in 
every thought ; for the symmetrical growth 
of the child's rarer faculties may have need 
of a retarded physical development, and the 
presence of a soul, coming forth into full self- 
consciousness, may be a restraining influence 
upon the coarser, and in animals more rapid 
construction of the body. We may need, lit- 
tle by little, to grow used to the weight of 
personal freedom; to expand our conscious- 
ness of existence slowly to the measure of a 
full, rounded soul. At least, it is a fact, how- 
ever explained, that the longest time is spent 
in the complete individualization of the higher 
forms of life ; the child learns many things 
before it begins to use the personal pronouns, 
me and mine. . 

But, whatever may be the physical ante- 
cedents, or conditions, of self-consciousness, 
the fact remains that the feeling of absolute 
dependence is inseparable, as a shadow and 
its substance, from our sense of personal ex- 
istence. Every man may verify it in his 
present experience ; for, however he may as- 
sert his freedom against the world, that proud 
sense of self-determination and superiority to 
the creation sinks into a feeling of helpless- 
ness and a sense of awe, before the mystery 
of his origin and his destiny. And this relig- 



44 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

ious feeling is, at present, an integral part of 
our sense of existence, which neither in its 
distinctive character, nor in our earliest recol- 
lections of it, betrays any marks or signs of 
derivation from any simpler elements of ex- 
perience. So far as I am aware, those writers 
who will admit only an earthly origin of man, 
have not succeeded in pointing out any in- 
stinct, or natural association, as the possible 
father or mother of this specific feeling. 
They seem to know only the remote ancestors 
of it. Biichner busies himself in bringing up 
savages destitute of religion to disprove the 
already abandoned doctrine of innate ideas ; 
and when one reads in general his arguments 
for a coarse materialism, it is easier to imag- 
ine, for the time, the truth of his own dic- 
tum, " that thought after all is only a move- 
ment of stuff ! " His metaphysics does re- 
mind one of stuff ! Mr. Darwin, generally a 
cautious writer, and nowhere a gross materi- 
alist, waives the higher question as to the 
existence of a Creator and Ruler of the uni- 
verse, * and devotes but a few pages to the 
origin of religious beliefs. " The complex 
feeling of religious devotion" he regards as 
of comparatively late occurrence, possible only 
after considerable intellectual and moral ad- 



1 Descent of Man," vol. i. , p. 63. 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 45 

vancement ; * but he enters into no exhaust- 
ive analysis of this complex feeling, though 
he thinks that the earliest trace of the ideas 
finally developed into the belief in God may 
probably have been the notions of spirits 
gained in the dreams of savage brains, f As 
Mr. Darwin brings the belief in one God into 
human history from the land of dreams only 
through the slowly-advancing ideas of the 
intellect, and the developed moral sense, his 
opinion can be most fairly questioned when 
we come to consider the origin of the moral 
sense. 

The fact, however, should not here be over- 
looked that to trace the natural history of 
religious ideas and their progress, is not in it- 
self an account of the impulse from which 
the whole movement of ideas was first origi- 
nated and is carried forward. So far as we 
can follow religious beliefs downward to their 
lowest forms among savage tribes, the feeling 
is always found to be before the idea of God, 
often existing vaguely before any words for 
Deity are formed in their rude speech. The 
civilized traveller may bring to some tribes 
for the first time the language of worship, but 
the religions feeling is in them before the 



* "Descent of Man," vol. i, p. 65. 
flbid., p. 63. 



46 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

coming of the missionary, and, as he teaches, 
it begins to fill ont those words with meaning. 
Could religion ever be taught to beings abso- 
lutely destitute of the feeling for it, any more , 
than a dog can be taught to worship, or a 
monkey to pray? The fact that among all 
men the ideas of religion are communicable 
thoughts would indicate the existence, alike in 
the civilized and the barbarian, in the mission- 
ary and in the savage, of that common human 
feeling of dependence which is the source of 
all religions. For the distinctive character, 
the peculiar and persistent power of this feel- 
ing of absolute dependence, natural science is 
as hard j)ushed to find among its known forces 
a sufficient cause, as it is unable to find in 
matter that first little germ of life which 
materialism sadly needs to discover. To 
follow the development of the idea of God, 
already existing, through its successive his- 
toric forms is one thing ; but it is quite another 
thing to find in the history itself the origin of 
the idea which has been at the root of its whole 
unfolding theology. Herbert Spencer, in his 
" Sociology," has not accounted, therefore, for 
the feeling which leads men to worship, by his 
induction of facts to prove that ancestor- wor- 
ship is the earliest form of religion. The 
feeling and the form which it assumes, the 
impulse of soul and the successive conceptions 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 47 

thrown out by it, are to be carefully distin- 
guished ; the one is no more to be taken for 
the other than the heat of a fire is to be con- 
founded with the rings of smoke it may send 
forth. Mr. Spencer's method is mainly one 
of quantitative analysis, where differences in 
quality are the very points to be determined. 
A qualitative analysis of human conscious- 
ness does not indicate the derivation of the 
sentiment of worship from ghost stories. Mr. 
Spencer can evolve the conception of a mental 
self out of " dream experiences," only as he 
follows the mere order of appearance, or 
possible succession in time of ideas. But the 
idea of self, the idea of an entity, remains 
still to be accounted for, whether or not the 
occasion of it was the contrast between the 
first man's waking consciousness and his 
" dream experiences." The same lack of close 
qualitative analysis vitiates the process by 
which man's religious consciousness is reduced 
through the worship of dead ancestors, and 
the fear of ghosts, to the idea of " the other 
self " gained in a dream. The spirit which is 
in man cannot, without further ado, be con- 
structed out of the conditions of its exist- 
ence; for the conditions of it are not even 
necessarily conditions before it. Neither can 
the origin of our spiritual ideas be deter- 
mined simply by a study of the conceptions 



48 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

of savages, or guesses concerning the fashions 
of thought among primitive men. They have 
in themselves the secret of their descent, and 
we must follow with the most searching in- 
vestigation every hint which they let fall, as 
they come and go, of their own birth and 
nobility. 

Men began to reason about blocks and 
stones, to study things, and at last to become 
scientists, because they felt the presence of an 
external world, and its strange phenomena 
were ever starting up new ideas — but what 
has led men from remote ages to think about 
God ? Why has man become a theologizing, 
as well as a naturalizing animal? Whence 
comes the sense of Divinity which has been 
before, and still is in all thoughts about the 
nature of God ? The age in which this reli- 
gious feeling first began to make itself felt in 
tremblings of heart, and questionings of life, 
can no more be found than the hour in our 
own memory when the presence of the High- 
est first overshadowed us. The religious feel- 
ing alike in the individual, so far as we can 
remember, and in history, so far as we can 
descend, is before all conscious thought of 
God, the fruitful parent of religions ; and the 
earliest recognizable theology is the outcome 
of a deep human sense of God before all 
theology. 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 49 

It lias already been observed that in the mor- 
al sphere, as in the physical universe, force has 
a great variety of manifestations, — a modern 
doctrine of the transformation and conservation 
of force which in morals an apostle seems to 
have anticipated when he said, " Now there are 
diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And 
there are differences of administrations, but the 
same Lord. But all these worketh that one 
and the self -same Spirit." This sense of abso- 
lute dependence, the simplest form of the relig- 
ious feeling, may be traced through different 
modes of expression. Among our Aryan an- 
cestors it seems to have taken the form of a 
worship of God in nature. Among the most 
degraded tribes of men it appears as a super- 
stitious fear of spirits, a sense of anxiety or 
fear before higher and often hostile powers, 
who cannot be met and slain with bow or 
spear. Very early, and very generally, it oc- 
casions the belief in the need of propitiation, 
and shows its power even over the most human 
instincts in the flames of sacrifice. In the mind 
of the Apostle Paul, bondman in Caesar's 
palace, the consciousness of absolute depend- 
ence upon God manifested itself in a grand 
sense of freedom and joy in finishing his course. 
Marcus Aurelius, emperor on Caesar's throne, 
was bowed by it in forced submission to the 
inevitable. In the mind of Herbert Spencer, 
3 



50 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

in its present stage of evolution, at least,* it 
takes the form of faith in an Unknown and 
Unknowable Power — a belief in which it is 
easier to see how religion and science can be re- 
conciled, than how the blessings of the Sermon 
on the Mount shall not pass away. The relig- 
ious feeling, in the play of the molecular forces 
which, constitute the brain of Prof. Tyndall, 
seems to survive, according to one of the latest 
manifestations of those forces through his or- 
gans of speech, as the sense of " the inscrutable 
Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom 
we live, and move, and have our being and our 
end." f In the groups of possibilities of sensation, 
which formed the consciousness of John Stuart 
Mill, the possibility of the religious feeling was 
not wanting in that indefinable melancholy in 
which at one time the kingdom of God seems 
to have come nigh unto him. And even Mat- 
thew Arnold, that veritable Don Quixote 
against the windmills of metaphysics, with 
his frequent hard riding, lance in rest, against 
the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester, 
can do no more in the end than invent another 
metaphysical term for the Divine influence 
which he feels enters at least into three-fourths 



* See President Porter's keen note on Spencer's philosophy in 
Ueberweg's " History of Philosophy," vol. ii., p. 433. 

f "Pop. Sci. Monthly," Article on Fermentation, Dec, 1876, 
p. 154 



THE FEELING OF DEPENDENCE. 5 1 

of life ; and his religious feeling preserves 
morality with its leavening faith in " The not 
ourselves which makes for righteousness." 
With a modern school of Dutch philosophers, 
religion is the sense of the u Moral Ideal ever 
coming to us." " Not we," they say, " took 
the first step, the Ideal drew us to itself, before 
we thought of it ; we loved God because He 
first loved us. The Ideal exists, it is not devel- 
oped out of humanity, but impresses itself on 
the consciousness of humanity."* With the 
mass of men, those who know from hard expe- 
rience what the struggle for existence is, the 
religious feeling generally takes the form of 
belief in an overruling Providence — that word 
which often appears to be a kind of compromise, 
a half-way word, between unbelief and faith. 
With Christian believers of every name, the 
common form and expression of the religious 
feeling is, "Our Father which art in Heaven." 
In the childhood of religions the feeling of de- 
pendence became a slavery, often cruel, to 
earthly elements; modern science would sub- 
stitute in place of the bondage to superstition 
rational accommodation of ourselves to our 
environment, and final submission to an eyeless 
and heartless system of laws; its supreme 



* For a fuller account of this school (Die Modernen), see Tul- 
loch, " The Christian Doctrine of Sin," p. 208. 



52 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

Power being, as some one has well said, " a 
mighty but blind Samson," whose hands are 
on the pillars of the universe, and who shall at 
last shake this whole system of things down 
into one undistinguishable and lifeless mass. 
And Christianity has still living and prophetic 
its Gospel of a Divine Sovereignty, which is 
neither the reign of an Almighty Caesar, ac- 
cording to the " secret counsels" of theology; 
nor the dominion of heartless and lifeless 
Force, according to the doctrine of the senses ; 
but which is the kingdom of perfect Love, 
according to the revelations of the Spirit. 

Such are some of the forms in which this 
original impulse of religion, the feeling of 
absolute dependence, has worked, and still 
is manifest. Always in one form or another ; 
in hope or in fear ; in belief or in doubt ; 
among the unlettered and the learned ; in the 
halls of science and between the reasonings of 
naturalists, as well as before the altars of the 
Church and in the thoughts of theologians; 
this distinctively human feeling has been pres- 
ent and operative ; it is an elemental force 
of human nature, working beneath reason 
and above reason, before thought and after 
thought ; the fear of Grocl, which is the begin- 
ning and the end of wisdom, 



CHAPTEE III. 

THE FEELING OF MORAL DEPENDENCE. 

There is another phase of the religious 
feeling by which it is to be distinguished from 
all other feelings. It involves not merely the 
sense of absolute dependence upon some power 
above ourselves and all finite things, but 
also the sense of dependence upon a supreme 
authority or absolute right. It is the feeling 
not only of finite being, but also of moral de- 
pendence, or the moral sense. There is a 
something other than ourselves and the world, 
which puts us both into dej3endence and 
under obligation. There is a feeling of re- 
sponsibility from which we cannot free our- 
selves even in thought. We cannot conceive 
ourselves to be, no man ever for a moment 
was conscious of himself as being; both abso- 
lutely independent, and without law. The 
feeling of our finiteness, and the feeling of 
obligation, or the sense of dependence for our 
beino; and for our well-being;, are but different 
phases of the consciousness of absolute de- 



54 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

pendence, which is the religious feeling in its 
most general form. 

But an issue has been raised, at this point, 
which our argument ought not to avoid by 
any roundabout appeal to prejudice, or stolen 
march in the dark : courses, however common 
they may be in polemical tactics, not to be 
followed by any who would prefer to be beat- 
en by Truth, rather than to succeed for the 
time with error. The vital issue is joined 
upon this question, whether the moral sense, 
or our human consciousness of moral depend- 
ence, like the feeling of dependent existence, 
is simple, and underived from other feelings ; 
not compounded of different experiences, but 
a primary element, an original force of human 
life. 

The question just stated leads us into the 
very thick of the latest scientific and philo- 
sophical controversies. As the field of Boeo- 
tia was called by Epaminondas the dancing 
plot of Mars, so may this inquiry concerning 
the nature and authority of conscience be said 
to be the field where the opposing spirits of our 
times hold perpetual controversy. Recently 
the utilitarian ethics of Bentham, and the elder 
Mill, have been badly broken up by the on- 
slaught of the Intuitionalists, who, not content- 
ing themselves merely with a defence of their 
own fundamental faiths, turned many of the 



THE MORAL SENSE. 55 

arguments of their opponents against them. 
Even John Stuart Mill's close reasonings have 
been pierced by arguments derived from his 
Autobiography for the u Reality of Duty." * 
But the broken line of the utilitarian logic 
has been reformed upon the ground of natural 
science, and the whole derivative school of 
moralists, as opposed to the Intuitionalists, 
holds a more tenable position under the cover 
of Darwin's theory of man's origin, and looks 
more formidable in the defences chosen by 
Herbert Spencer. 

Mr. Darwin in his plausible chapter on " The 
Moral Sense," does not wish to dissolve the 
reality of duty into the mere desire of pleas- 
ure, and would not impufce to morality the 
base origin of selfishness. He seeks , however, 
to render probable the view, that the moral 
sense may have been derived, through a long 
succession of inherited experiences, from the 
social instinct, including sympathy. He re- 
gards it as in a high degree probable,f "that 
any animal whatever, endowed with well- 
marked social instincts, would inevitably ac- 
quire a moral sense, or conscience, as soon as 
its intellectual powers had become as well de- 
veloped, or nearly as well developed as in man." 



* See " Contemporary Review," Aug., 1876. 
f u Descent of Man," vol. i., p. 68. 



56 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

In this view the moral sense is fundamentally 
identical with the social instincts. 

It should be noticed that in Mr. Darwin's 
own attempt to trace the development of the 
moral sense from purely animal instincts, ideas 
of morality drawn from other sources quietly 
slip into the argument. The detection of 
these excites suspicion of the whole perform- 
ance. Much of the plausibility of the chapter 
on the Moral Sense is derived from the unob- 
served manner in which the idea to be gained 
at the end of it steals into the beginning, and 
helps on the argument, where otherwise it 
would be brought to a halt. * Thus, in the pas- 
sage just quoted, the very supposition includes 
some power of moral discernment; for it is 
impossible to conceive of intellectual powers 
as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man, 
without the existence of ideas of good and 
evil, or the mental discernment of some stand- 
ard of conduct. But these ideas, this power 
of moral judgment, is the very thing at issue; 
and to say, therefore, that any animal, as soon 
as he has become intellectually like man, would 
acquire a moral sense, is very much like saying 
that as soon as an animal possessed moral ideas 
he would acquire moral ideas. Mr. Darwin,* 
besides " highly developed " mental faculties, 



* " Descent of Man," vol. i., p. 69. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 57 

throws in " the feeling of dissatisfaction ; " 
and also the acquisition of " the power of lan- 
guage," and the distinct expression of "the 
wishes of members of the same community ;" 
and also, the idea of " the good of the commu- 
nity," and, "the power of public opinion," 
and "habit," and "obedience to the wishes 
and judgments of the community," — all these, 
be it noticed, originating before the moral sense 
is finally acquired, and being necessary to its 
acquisition by animals ! The exclamation of 
Dominie Sampson seems appropriate, as we 
read this purely natural history of the moral 
sense, " Prodigious ! " 

Moral ideas not only slip into the statements, 
by means of which Mr. Darwin, at the opening 
of his chapter, proposes to account for the ori- 
gin of the moral sense, but also they run 
through the whole process of his reasoning. 
Thus he remarks : " As the feelings of love and 
sympathy, and the power of self-command be- 
come strengthened by habit, and as the power 
of reasoning becomes clearer, so that man can 
appreciate the justice of the judgments of his 
fellow-men, he will feel himself impelled, inde- 
pendently of any pleasure or pain felt at the 
moment, to certain lines of conduct." * Notice, 
up to this point in the reasoning, he has under 

* " Descent of Man," vol. i., p. 83, 



58 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

investigation only social instincts. But here, 
through this one sentence, at least four germs 
of moral ideas enter into the process of evolu- 
tion ; viz. : (1,) " Love," which is here subjected 
to no analysis, but which usually means more 
than an instinct of pleasure in another. (2,) 
" Power of self-command," which involves the 
distinct consciousness of self, and of a struggle 
between self and something else, or between 
different motives within the self-consciousness 
— which is a moral process. (3,) " Power to 
appreciate the justice of the judgment of 
his fellow-men," — but in this phraseology we 
are a long ways beyond social instincts ; and 
(4,) " Feeling himself impelled, independently 
of any pleasure or pain felt at the moment," — 
which is all the feeling of duty that the most 
developed Intuitionalist would require of an 
angel ! Mr. Darwin brings in besides to help 
on the development, the phrases, " law of hon- 
or," " the standard of morality," " the higher 
standard," u the noblest part of our nature ;" 
but these words carry in them a moral judg- 
ment, and the idea of a reference of conduct to 
something external, necessary, and authorita- 
tive ; and Mr. Darwin on his own theory should 
substitute, in the process of evolution, at least 
for all such phrases, simply the words " social 
instinct," " persistent social instinct ;" and his 
chapter needs revision by striking out of it any 



THE MORAL SENSE. 59 

word which he has brought into the account 
from his own fully-formed moral consciousness. 
Indeed Mr. Darwin's reasonings need to be 
tested by an examination as strictly scientific 
as that which has disappointed the hopes of 
the believers in spontaneous generation. Pas- 
teur seems to have shown, and Prof. Tyndall 
has confirmed his experiments, that if all germs 
of life are carefully excluded, matter never fer- 
ments, never of itself produces life, and would 
remain inorganic matter for ever. If Mr. Dar- 
win had been more careful to exclude the unno- 
ticed germs of morality from his reasonings, he 
would have found it more difficult to believe 
in the spontaneous generation of conscience. 
But, as Prof. Tyndall* says, the great source 
of the error of those who have imagined them* 
selves possessed of proofs of spontaneous gen- 
eration is that they have worked " in an atmos- 
phere charged with the germs of these organ- 
isms ; " so the Darwinians, who have satisfied 
themselves with their proofs of the spontane- 
ous generation of conscience, have been work- 
ing all the time in an atmosphere charged with 
moral influences. Eliminate all moral ideas 
let into Mr. Darwin's reasoning from existing 
moral judgments, and you will have in the end 
not the first sign of conscience, no approach 

* "Pop. Science Monthly," article Fermentation, Dec, 1876, p. 
135. 



60 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

in the natural process to moral life. Mr. 
Mivart * very fairly gives the following as an 
example of a sentence of Darwin's so expur- 
gated, and calls attention to the fact that such 
substitution eliminates everv element of moral- 
ity from the passage : " Looking to future gen- 
erations, there is no cause to fear that the 
social instincts will grow weaker, and we may 
expect that enduring (virtuous) habits will 
grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by in- 
heritance. In this case the struggle between 
our stronger (higher) and weaker (lower) im- 
pulses will be less severe, and the strong (vir- 
tue) will be triumphant" (voL i., p. 104). 

The derivative theory of the moral sense 
is stated in its strongest form by Herbert 
Spencer. " I believe/' he says, " that the ex- 
periences of utility organized and consolidated 
through all past generations of the human 
race, have been producing corresponding mod- 
ifications, which, by continued transmissions 
and accumulation, have become in us certain 
faculties of moral intuition — certain emotions 
responding to right and wrong conduct, which 
have no apparent basis in the individual ex- 
periences of utility." f Experiences of utility 
grown into an instinct, experiences of good 



* " Lessons from Nature," p. 114. 

f Quoted by Darwin, " Descent of Man, 77 vol. i., p. 97. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 6 1 

heaped up and inherited as habits, furnish, it 
must be confessed, a better clew to conduct, a 
more immediately available rule of right and 
wrong than a calculation of profit and loss at 
each moment of moral action. It is true that 
experience, on the whole, does make for right- 
eousness. It is a fact, as Rothe finely said, 
that " conscience and the issues of things go 
together." But conscience and the nearest 
results of action do not always go together; 
and the very separation between virtue and 
happiness in this world has compelled pro- 
found thinkers, like Kant, to believe in an- 
other life. There is some difficulty in con- 
ceiving how the experience of the utility of 
goodness to some individuals, could so greatly 
have overbalanced the prosperity of the 
wicked as to work a general conviction amonof 
men of a necessary and unchangeable law of 
right. Or, granting that amid the moral con- 
fusions of this world the higher moral order 
may gradually disclose itself through inherited 
individual experiences of happiness, it is still 
hard to see how, in this conglomerate expe- 
rience, the two ideas, utility and right, ever 
became separate, the two lines of experience 
ever became disentangled, as they are actually 
held apart in our moral sentiments, and have 
been kept distinct in human .language from 
antiquity. Moreover, it is an obvious fact of 



62 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

our present experience that a moral standard 
based on utility does not tend toward a high 
moral ideal, but, on tile contrary, falls to the 
level of the average morality of a community ; 
and it is not easy to see how Mr. Spencer's 
accumulation of experiences of utility provides 
a principle and law of moral progress, by 
which the standard of judgment is itself kept 
up, and the average morality of men raised 
towards the superior ideal of the few. * Mr. 
Spencer might be referred, perhaps, to his own 
essay on " The Morals of Trade," for exam- 
ples of \h^ tendency of a standard of utility 
downward to a low average of morality ; and 
the question might fairly be raised, in view of 
the commercial profits which have legalized 
questionable customs, and brought into com- 
mon vogue practices which originated in 
fraud, whence did Mr. Spencer derive that 
fine moral sense which leads him, contrary to 
the heaped-up experiences of utility of several 



* Mr. Spencer ("First Principles," p. 148) substitutes the word 
evolution for progress, and in his u Psychology," and in his " Re- 
ply to Criticisms " he rejects the idea of progress whose force is 
free will. Freedom he holds would be only " a disturbing element 
in the beneficent movement carrying man on to a nobler char- 
acter." Evolution, he also holds, involves the progression of parts 
of the universe at the expense of other parts. ( 4i Sociology," pp. 
107, 8). Is there no law of progress for the universe as a whole ? 
There can be no progress of the whole without the influx of 
Divine energy. See " Conservation of Energy " (Intern. Scientific 
Series), pp. 199, 200. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 6$ 

generations of successful business men, to con- 
demn them as lie does ? 

But, not to insist upon these questions con- 
cerning the power of man's experience of the 
good policy of honesty to create that high 
ideal of honor which puts millions beneath the 
contempt of virtue, and leads men to choose 
death rather than a lie — this whole deriva- 
tive theory of morals, in every form of it, 
must be brought to the test of the facts of 
man's moral consciousness and history. Does 
the derivative theory of conscience account for 
all the observed facts ? 

In a thorough consideration of this question, 
also, we must distinguish carefully between 
the natural history of conscience and its dis- 
tinctive character. The manner of growth, 
and the specific nature of an object are ob- 
viously too very different subjects of inquiry ; 
but precisely this palpable difference seems to 
have been ignored in Mr. Darwin's attempt to 
derive the moral sense from the social in- 
stincts, without first subjecting the contents 
of conscience to a careful analysis. Let it be 
admitted that he may have given a possible i 
natural history of the growth of the moral 
sense, a description not improbable of the 
manner in which man came to the full posses- 
sion of himself, as viewed from the outward 
or physical side of life. This account, indeed, 



64 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

at some points is questionable, and at others 
no little " scientific use of tlie imagination " is 
needed to follow it. Thus, the statement upon 
which much weight is laid, that the strictly 
social virtues are at first alone regarded, 
should at least be punctuated with an interro- 
gation mark.* The more strictly personal vir- 
tues seem to be first in the order of nature, 
and the virtues necessary to the existence of 
the family take precedence of the virtues 
necessary to the welfare of the tribe, or- the 
strictly social virtues. The instances which 
Mr. Darwin adduces, as notably that of cour- 
age, are examples of " self -regarding virtues," 
which are developed in the individual life be- 
fore they can be emphasized by the praise of 
a tribe. The natural history of virtue seems 
to lead down to a deep personal root, and we 
do not go below the surface, if we begin only 
with the social virtues, and do not search for 
the hidden personal feeling from which the 
whole growth springs. But, admitting the 
value of Mr. Darwin's chapter as a study of 
the development of man's higher powers, 
viewed from the physical side of the complex 
process of human growth, the nature of that 

* Mr. Lecky, "History of European Morals," vol. i., p. 136, 
says, u The courageous endurance of suffering is probably the 
first form of human virtue." Herbert Spencer says, (" Sociology," 
p. 79,) " Sociality, strong in the civilized man, is less strong in the 
savage man," etc. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 65 

growth, the contents of the moral life, remain 
still to be considered. You have not told 
what the ripe ear is when you have described 
the blade and the husk. Because the coarser 
husk may be the first in time to appear, and 
may serve to protect the grain, it does not 
follow that the corn is like the husk, or even 
grew out of the husk. Both have grown from 
a hidden root, and in accordance with a law 
which made each after its kind ; as both the 
natural and the spiritual may grow from an 
unseen and divine principle of life, and in 
accordance with, a purpose which fashioned 
them in the depths of its wisdom before ever 
they were brought forth. The real nature 
and worth of things may be guessed from 
their manner and order of appearance in time ; 
but what things are can be determined only 
by a critical analysis of their contents. That 
which was natural was held to be first long 
before modern theories of evolution were pro- 
pounded. " Howbeit," says that apostle who 
in his epistle has drawn with a bold hand the 
outlines of a Christian philosophy of the crea- 
tion, "Howbeit that was not first which is 
spiritual ; but that which is natural, and after- 
ward that which is spiritual ; " and to Mr. 
Darwin belongs the credit of having brought 
forth many examples from his rich store-house 
of biological facts, to confirm this order of the 



66 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

creation long ago insisted upon by a Christian 
apostle. But because the natural may be the 
first to emerge, it does not follow that the 
spiritual may not appear afterwards ; because 
the dust is first, and the human mind second 
in existence; the social instincts first in his- 
tory (if they are), and the idea of a moral 
law second ; it by no means follows that the 
spiritual is derived from the natural ; that the 
mind is but a better combination of particles 
of dust ; or that conscience is only the social 
instinct dressed up in a later fashion ; as it 
does not follow from the order of growth that 
the husk is like the grain, or the wheat only 
chaff. The very question at issue is, whether 
within the natural there is a distinct, spiritual 
growth, having its own quality and worth ? 
And this decisive question the naturalist sim- 
ply begs, unless he subjects the moral con- 
sciousness and history of our race to a search- 
ing analysis, as patient and as niicroscoj)ic as 
the investigation with which he is accustomed 
to honor the facts of physics. But whoever 
does not choose to beg the question, and en- 
deavors to make a scientific study of this sub- 
ject, becomes, thereby, more than a physicist, 
and is, of necessity, a metaphysician. He 
enters upon the legitimate domain of mental 
and moral philosophy, and, while there, he dis- 
regards, at his own peril of becoming bewil- 



THE MORAL SENSE. 67 

dered, the guiding voices of those whose 
lifelong pursuits have made them at home 
upon these grounds ; as moral philosophers in 
their turn neglect, at the peril of their own 
confusion, the guidance of naturalists in their 
chosen fields. 

Moreover, it should be noticed that the 
question concerning the origin of the moral 
sense is not identical with the question 
whether conscience is not developed in expe- 
rience, and strengthened by inherited lessons 
of life. Whatever is in man would seem to 
be subject to certain general conditions of 
growth, and it may be at once admitted that 
conscience likewise is at first a germinant feel- 
ing, capable of vast development. Experiences 
of happiness, or suffering, may be to conscience 
as the heat and the cold, sunshine and storm, 
are to the plant — necessary conditions of its 
growth and hardihood. Suffering, indeed, 
seems sometimes required, to bring out into 
one's consciousness moral meanings, as the 
flames make legible invisible writing. Gwen- 
dolen — proud, mistaken girl — consents to a 
sinful marriage, and in suffering finds her con- 
science. It is so true, as to be but a truism, 
that the moral sense grows from childhood, 
and through life. And as it is in the individ- 
ual, so may it be in history. The moral sense 
of mankind may have already passed through 



68 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

a long process of evolution, until the wild, 
thoughtless conscience of the savage has ma- 
tured into the highly organized morality of 
Christian peoples. There has been undoubted 
and gratifying progress of the public moral 
sense in modern times. We condemn un- 
sparingly, for example, acts of intolerance 
against which, not many generations ago, 
hardly a protesting voice was heard. Every 
sin seems darker, and is blacker, against in- 
creasing light. As mankind advances in 
moral intelligence, the sin of the world grows 
worthy of the greater condemnation. I would 
rather have Cain for a client than almost any 
of his imitators. He had never seen a gal- 
lows, never looked upon a corpse. He had 
not before him the language and habits of 
generations to educate him into abhorrence of 
blood. No crime had then been stamped and 
branded as crime by Jong years of judgment. 
He had not around him even the restraining 
laws of civilization. Murder then was bad 
enough, a crime against nature ; but it was 
worse after the word of the Lord came to him, 
showing it to be also a crime against God. 
And the Lord suffered nature only to punish 
Cain, setting a brand upon him lest any find- 
ing him should kill him. But other crimi- 
nals heaven judged not so lightly : afterward 
God required, at the hand of man's brother, 



THE MORAL SENSE. 69 

the life of man. A crime, in itself, in its 
quantity, that is, the same, may be better, or 
worse in quality, according to the ignorance 
or enlightenment in which it is committed. 
Some wrongs into which even good men were 
betrayed as late as the seventeenth century, in 
this nineteenth century could be committed 
only by thoroughly bad men. After every 
moral advance of mankind the same evil 
deeds require for their performance worse 
men. 

As conscience in the past has grown, and 
become sensitive to many evils of which it 
formerly had little or no perception; so it is 
possible for us to conceive of beings in whose 
highly organized spirits the feeling of moral 
dependence may become a sensitiveness to 
goodness and to God, as far transcending our 
moral impressions as the fine touch of the 
artist, in whose fingers ancestral talents for 
music culminate, surpasses the rough hand of 
the day -laborer. We may be, still, low down 
in the scale of moral development — above us 
hierarchies of angels ! But the fact that any 
taste may be susceptible of almost indefinite 
cultivation, is of itself no proof that it is de- 
rived from some lower instinct. It is one 
thing to say that the moral sense is capable of 
development, or that its growth may depend 
upon quite earthly conditions; but it is 



JO THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

another thing to assert that it is a recent pro- 
duct, a mere composite of other tastes or in- 
stincts ; and the evidence of the one assertion 
is no shadow of proof of the other. We may 
find, on the contrary, the principle which de- 
velops into the full moral consciousness of 
our race, and which is capable of we know not 
what higher growth, existing as a living germ 
in the original nature of man ; through history 
growing ever from its own root, and by its 
own vital force making increase of itself out 
of the earthly experiences from which it 
springs. 

Neither does the question as to the simple 
and underived nature of the moral feeling con- 
cern the conflicting judgments of right and 
wrong which have prevailed at different times, 
or in different communities. The forms and 
objects of the moral feeling may vary, while 
the feeling remains essentially one and the 
same. We do not conclude that the simple af- 
fections which bind families together differ 
in kind, because the tastes of men are not 
agreed as to what is lovable or beautiful, be- 
cause savages often select their wives for 
charms which to civilized men seem deformi- 
ties.* Love is love always, though in any par- 



* Sir John Lubbock cites instances to show that u true love is 
almost unknown " among the lower races ; marriage being " the 
means of getting their dinner cooked." (" Origin of Civilization," 



THE MORAL SENSE. 7 1 

ticular case it may lead to a false choice of its 
object. It is idle, then, to adduce the numer- 
ous diversities in moral judgments, or even in- 
stances of perverted moral choice, as an indi- 
cation that the moral feeling itself is the prod- 
uct of non moral experiences. Like applied 
mathematics, moral conclusions may need, from 
time to time, revision ; but, as the miscalcula- 
tions of the algebraists do not lie as an objec- 
tion against the axioms of pure mathematics, 
so errors of application in morals do not inval- 
idate the intuitions which render any moral 
conclusions possible. The question, therefore, 
with which we have to do, concerns not the 
growth, or the conditions, or the different man- 
ifestations of the moral feeling, but solely and 
directly the nature or contents of the feeling 
itself. Does experience show any simpler 
form of it ? Can our most powerful methods 
of analysis break it up into any constituent 
parts, or is it one of the elements of human 
consciousness and history ? 

The first step to be taken in our search for 
the facts bearing upon this question is, to ob- 



pp. 50, 51.) But this apparent absence of the " social instinct, in- 
cluding sympathy," between men and women, is no proof that it 
does not exist germinantly in human nature, and that love and 
the family life are an artificial product of society. So of religion 
and the moral sense ; the earliest notions about them may be as 
indefinite as the Australian's idea of marriage. But they exist, 
nevertheless, as the germinant life of civilization. 



72 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

tain, if we can, the unconscious testimony of 
consciousness. The first words of a witness 
before his testimony can have been manipula- 
ted by others, or pressed by his own thoughts 
into a desired form, is justly regarded as of 
the greatest value. Lawyers, for this reason, 
often advise their clients to waive a prelimi- 
nary examination. Testimony obtained before 
a case can be made up, often lets the truth 
out. In like manner, the unconscious testi- 
mony of the soul to itself is of prime import- 
ance. What the mind discovers in itself and 
discloses concerning itself before its thoughts 
have received the impress of any philosophy, 
or its feelings have been turned in the direc- 
tion of any creed, should be held, as evidence, 
in the highest repute. The testimony of the 
human consciousness under preliminary exam- 
ination, without the aid of counsel, scientific or 
theological, may give the clew to the mystery 
of our being, for whose secret we anxiously 
listen and wait. 

But this spontaneous witness of the soul to it- 
self it is hard to obtain. The case in life is 
well made up for us before we come to take 
our part in it. We are impressed by what we 
hear from others before we begin to speak. 
Our very memories go back to fathers' counsels, 
and mothers 7 faces, as the earliest recollections 
of childhood. Geologists find in many places, 



THE MORAL SENSE. j$ 

upturned to their inspection, what they call 
the azoic formation, matter before all life. 
From the still depths of the ocean the sound- 
ing lead brings up the earliest organic forms. 
But the long-continued storms of controversy, 
the restlessness of thought, and the raging 
passions of men, have disturbed the very depths 
of the consciousness of this nineteenth century. 
The azoic formation of the human soul, that 
which lies beneath individual life, our ele- 
mental being, is so overlaid by our later life ; 
so hidden beneath strata upon strata of past 
beliefs and hard prejudices, that sometimes 
only by a general intellectual convulsion, a 
moral earthquake, as it were, can the deep 
things of the soul be brought to the surface, 
and what is in man be revealed. The asso- 
ciations of a mind like that of Mr. Mill, for 
example, whatever value may attach to them 
as logical products, are of little or no worth 
as evidences of the structure of the human soul. 
For Mr. Mill's mind, more remarkably, j)erhaps, 
than any other in history, was a made mind, 
the predetermined product of his father's work. 
Nature has little to say in his Autobiography. 
Or an example, from a different order of 
minds, of the difficulty in seeing upturned to 
view the azoic constitution of the soul, is to be 
found in the life and works of John Calvin. 
For Calvin had by birth a Latin rather than 
4 



74 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

a human soul. His personal appearance is 
said to have resembled that of a Roman Cen- 
sor. He had by training a Latin rather than a 
human theology ; and though in the heat and 
movement of the forces of his powerful intel- 
lect many deep, grand truths of God and the 
human soul are thrown up into the light, there 
are elements of our nature which rarely, or 
never, appeared in his reasonings ; there are 
ethical ideas which lie unworked beneath his 
theology.* 

Often one of the most difficult tasks, as it 
is one of the strongest desires, of an educated 
mind, is to sink a shaft through its own be- 
liefs, and to reach the primary convictions, 
and first laws of its being. We long to find 
ourselves, and not others in us ; ourselves — and 
not our ancestors ; ourselves — and not our 
early teachers, or the last book. Are my con- 
victions part of my very self — what I must 
think and feel and do in order to be myself — ■ 
or are they importations from without ? Every 
candid mind must realize this difficulty. 

But the true investigator, Prof. Tynclall 
remarks, guards himself against saying it is 
impossible. Though often difficult it does not 
seem to be impossible for us to find in human 



* See Domer's ' ; G-esehichte der protestantischer Theologie," 
pp. 374-395, for a profound estimation of the truths and the ethical 
defects of Calvinism. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 75 

history the bottom facts of human conscious- 
ness ; or even in ourselves, at times, to reach 
the fundamental basis of all our faiths. There 
are experiences of life which lay bare the 
foundations, as there have been periods in his- 
tory when the underlying strata of society 
were brought to the surface. There are times 
when the native energies of the soul burn 
through all superimposed customs. There come 
moments in every man's life when out of the 
abundance of the heart the mouth speaketk, and 
we know what manner of man he is. Such 
times are the hours of danger, fear, great 
endeavor, sorrow — and the last hour of life. 
These are seasons of soul disclosure, of moral 
revelation. Thus, there was one moment in 
which Voltaire ceased to be the artificial prod- 
uct of French society of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, and acted as a man ; for, during a terrible 
thunderstorm among the Alps, he is said to 
have fallen upon his knees in awe, and prayed ; 
and then, speedily recovering himself, he arose 
and began to curse ! The spectacle of human 
wrongs, the cry of the injured for avenging 
help, the peril of the lives and the liberties 
of men; all emergencies, in short, or great 
crises in history, are seasons of moral rev- 
elation ; by their coming to us, as of old it 
was said of the Son of Man, the thoughts 
of many hearts are revealed. And men who 



J 6 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

for years have worn masks before their fellow- 
men, and deceived even their own souls, drop 
them in the last dread straggle of life with 
death. The final hour of life often seems to 
bring men nearer the first faiths of child- 
hood than do the intervening years. Death 
seems to be to memory the opening of the 
book of life, as it is to faith the unsealing the 
book of revelations. 

If, then, we watch others in those crises 
when life takes them by surprise, and they 
act or speak out of their reserved power ; in 
these supreme moments of intense personal 
consciousness when the disguises of nature are 
consumed, and old habits are dissolved in fer- 
vent heat; then often the human heart is re- 
vealed, and in the light of the conviction with 
which the mind is filled we read the tes- 
timony of a human soul to itself. Or, if we 
come sometimes upon ourselves suddenly; 
catch our own minds, as it were, in undress ; 
overhear the whisperings of our own thoughts, 
when our creeds are off their guard ; we may 
find out ourselves, and be better able to divine 
what is in man. 

The question, then, now before us, shapes 
itself, first, in this manner : In the hours 
when men are most themselves, is there mani- 
fest a sense of right, a motive of duty, which 
is unlike all other feelings, simple, and sepa- 



THE MORAL SENSE. J J 

rate from all other phenomena of conscious- 
ness ? Or can the feeling which leads a man 
to put his life in jeopardy for the right, or to 
sacrifice his own happiness to duty — if arrest- 
ed and analyzed at this very moment of its 
free self-revelation — be made to appear as a 
transformed social instinct, or the result of 
heaps of experience of utility ? 

It is an experience too common to be ques- 
tioned, however moralists may endeavor to 
explain it, that conscience, as men are swayed 
by it without reasoning or theory concerning 
its authority, does act upon them, and through 
them, in a manner unlike that of all other 
known influences, and to the working out of 
results which no other known force of conduct 
could, or would produce. The moral sense, 
as it appears on such occasions to move men, 
neither is seen to flow out of, nor into self-in- 
terest ; often it does not run parallel with the 
course of self-interest; sometimes it crosses 
and makes head against strongly-opposing 
currents of self-interest. It does not approach 
us with the manner of a merchant, but speaks 
as one having authority. It does not hold up 
before us a calculation of profit and loss, but 
a commandment. The moral sense never at 
such times, when we know it best, seems to 
be an acquired habit of balancing utilities, 
a quick method of computing interest, a 



J 8 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

patent ligb tiling-calculator.^ Good Bishop 
Butler could hardly have been thinking of 
his own advantage when, in his youth, he pro- 
posed to make truth the business of his life; 
nor could he have had an eye single to his own 
benefit when, in his prosperity, he said to his 
secretary : " I should be ashamed of myself 
if I could leave ten thousand pounds behind 
me." Most men do not stop to think of heaven 
or hell, when they stand up for the oppressed, 
or hold out a helping hand to the fallen ; but 
they act at once and spontaneously from their 
feeling; of what ought to be done. The sense 
of duty is often strongest, and human action 
most determined, when the consequences in- 
volve direct suffering, or troubles w r hich are 
beyond computation. Thus, Paul was deter- 
mined to push forward and to apprehend the 
things for which he felt himself to have been 
apprehended, though he knew not what might 
befall him ; Athanasius stood for his convic- 
tion of truth against the world ; Luther 
would go to Leipsic because he felt bound 
to go, though it should rain Duke Georges 



* ' ' Vice may be defined to be a miscalculation of chances, a mis- 
take in estimating the value of pleasures and pains. It is false 
moral arithmetic." — Bentham. (See Lecky's "History of Euro- 
pean Morals," vol. i., p. 13.) Virtue and vice, in this view, are 
quantities rather than qualities. Ethics becomes, thus, a science 
of moral weights and equations ! 



THE MORAL SENSE. Jg 

nine days ; the pages of history are illu- 
mined with the names of those who defied 
death in obedience to what they deemed a 
higher law; and so have thousands and tens 
of thousands of men unknown to fame acted, 
regardless of consequences, out of their own 
pure sense of right; so every day people who 
may not have in them the stuff of martyrs, 
nevertheless put behind them their own com- 
fort, and face unpleasant duties under the im- 
pulse of some disinterested motive. 

It is a frequently noticeable fact that the 
moral feeling does not act as it might be ex- 
pected to do, if it were only a social instinct. 
Often, on the contrary, as it wells up from its 
own pure spring in the heart, it fails alto- 
gether to follow the worn channels of social 
life; nay, it will leave even the natural 
courses of affection rather than fail to follow 
its own stronger law. Its word of authority 
has set households at variance, and many 
have not loved father or mother, wife or chil- 
dren, more than its ennobling service. The 
evident superiority of the moral sense not 
only to social instinct, but to friendship, and 
the strongest love, is a fact of conscience 
often revealed in its spontaneous action, of 
which the derivative theory has no intelli- 
gible explanation. Over against the analo- 
gies from bees and migratory birds, by means 



80 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

of which Mr. Darwin seeks to render credible 
the origin of moral dissatisfaction and re- 
morse, stand splendid examples of the sacri- 
fice of social happiness to the requirements of 
the moral law ; and Mr. Darwin does not 
mention that instance of the supremacy of a 
felt duty even over parental affection which 
has come down from a remote antiquity in 
the description of Abraham's offering of 
Isaac. * The lines of this theory do not take 
in, within their narrow perspective, that scene 
of obedience from ancient pastoral life, or 
that later example of Roman virtue, the giv- 
ing up by the judge of his own son to death, f 
The natural or unconscious witness of the 
soul to its own moral worth appears, at times, 
quite ingenuously in the writings of the man in 
whom, of all recent authors, we should least 
expect to detect it, Mr. John Stuart Mill. In 
that protracted period of despondency which 
he -described in the Autobiography, he stood in 



*Mr. Spenser (" Psychology," vol. ii., p. 601) explains such in- 
stances of obedience to a supposed Divine command against the 
most persistent instinct by the effects of ghost stories told from 
generation to generation until they became a part of Abraham's 
nerve structure ! Morality thus becomes a battle between the 
heart and the nerves, with the advantage (so far as heard from) 
decidedly on the side of the nerves. 

f The equation does not hold good : " The social instinct 
including sympathy. " = the Hebrew consciousness of law, or Ro- 
man virtue. The value of the known quantities requires a higher 
valuation than this of the x in the moral equation. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 8 1 

the shadow of a higher Eeality than he had 
dreamed of in his philosophy. In his admission 
that life must be shaped as though there was 
a higher law than happiness, " an ideal end," * 
we have the unconscious testimony of con- 
science to its own nobility. Nature, repressed 
by the father's stern hand, and held under the 
strict control of his own logic, in one passage 
of his writings breaks out into an impassioned 
assertion of the supreme authority of the moral 
ideal. In his examination of " Sir William 
Hamilton's Philosophy " f he utters a vehe- 
ment protestation against the idea of a God 
whose will might make wrong right. Such a 
God, Mr. Mill indignantly declares, he never 
would worship. But why not ? If two and 
two in other spheres may make five, why may 
not wrong make right ? " No," says Mr. Mill, 
of a God whose government is not sanctioned 
by the highest human morality which we are 
capable of conceiving, " call this being by the 
names which express and affirm the highest 
human morality, I say in plain terms that I 
will not." But why not ? " He shall not com- 
pel me to worship him," says Mr. Mill. But 
if to worship him would insure the greatest 



* Autobiography, pp. 142, 143. In his " Essays on Religion," 
he argues from pure disinterestedness, and objects even to the 
Gospel that it holds out the promise of the reward of Heaven ! 

f Vol. i., p. 131. See Mivart, " Lessons from Nature," p. 104. 



82 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

happiness, and to despise him the greatest 
misery, why should Mr. Mill not worship him ? 
" No," he replies, " if such a being can sentence 
me to hell * * * to hell I will go." But upon 
what conceivable principle of utility should 
Mr. Mill go to hell ? How will it profit him ? 
"What conceivable good will come of it to 
others ? Why should he not love his own 
happiness ? Is utilitarianism also among the 
prophets that it would reject heaven rather 
than confound moral distinctions ? Will the 
apostle of utilitarianism in his disinterested 
love of virtue rival St. Theresa in her wish to 
have a torch in her right hand and a vessel of 
water in her left, that with the one she might 
burn up the glories of heaven, and with the 
other extinguish the flames of hell, in order to 
serve Grod out of pure love % Mr. Mill surely 
strikes a responsive chord in our moral senti- 
ments when he says, " I will call no being 
good who is not what I mean when I apply 
that epithet to my fellow creatures; " but the 
only reason we can give — and is not the same 
Mr. Mill's only reason ? — is because it would 
not be in accordance with our sense of right 
to worship him ; because we do feel the reality 
of moral distinctions, and no reasonings can 
make us wholly forgetful of our original per- 
ceptions of moral truth ; and therefore a God 
whose will should confound right and wrong, 



THE MORAL SENSE. 83 

would be to us no worshipful being. So long 
as we have a moral feeling which is different 
from utility, or social instinct — which is an 
immediate sense of the right, we would 
never* worship a God who would not do 
right. 

Conscience, therefore, so far as we may 
judge from the first testimony of the soul to 
itself, is not a transformed sensation, or ac- 
quired taste, but a distinct, specific, and neces- 
sary feeling, inseparable from our very con- 
sciousness of existence. It speaks not as our 
lower instincts, — not as the scribes, but as one 
having authority. 

The question as to the origin of the Moral 
Sense must be answered, secondly, from the 
evidence obtainable from the most developed 
forms of conscience. For the principle already 
mentioned that a scientific theory of any spe- 
cific difference should account for it at its 
points of greatest divergence, as well as in its 
lowest terms, affords a decisive test of the suffi- 
ciency of any theories concerning the moral 
sense. A strictly scientific account of con- 
science must answer not only for the germin- 
ant, but also for the full-grown and perfect 
life. A complete explanation of man's moral 
nature must bring within its range of possi- 
bilities not only our musical, ape-like ancestors, 
or the mound builders of antiquity possessed 



84 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

of the " half -art, half instinct of language ; " * 
but also civilized people, who build hospitals 
and churches, and who have so far advanced 
beyond considerations of present utility that 
the saying has passed into a proverb among 
them : Let justice be done though the heavens 
fall. More than this should be required of a 
moral system. Its foundations should be laid 
deep enough and strong enough to bear the 
weight of the whole perfected and finished 
Temple of religion. The theory must look for- 
ward and upward as well as backward and 
downward, and account not only for the sup- 
posed feelings of migratory birds and busy 
bees, but also for all conceivable human prog- 
ress in virtue, for any imaginable angelic 
graces, and for the very perfection of Deity. 
The moral ideal which ever goes before men, 
a living power, must be kept steadily in the 
eye of any philosophy which will not condemn 
itself of loving darkness rather than light. 
If you tell me, therefore, that among savages 
you can see, or beyond history, in still lower 
beings having the form of men, you can imag- 
ine nothing but social instinct, including sym- 
pathy; I answer that among the highest races 
I can see, and beyond history at the other end 
of time I can imagine, virtue, unselfishness, 



' Descent of Man," vol. i., p. 101. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 85 

and love, refined from every touch, of earthli- 
ness, and shining in their own pure light ; 
and my philosophy of morals must be able 
not only to look down into the dust, but also 
up to the heavens ! 

The advocates of the derivative theory of 
conscience are not so much in the habit of 
looking up along the diverging lines between 
mere animal life and man's moral history, as 
they are occupied in looking down along the 
converging lines of life to their starting-points 
of least difference in the uniform, gelatinous 
egg. But as you cannot have true physics 
without astronomy, a correct view of the 
earth without a look, at least, at the stars, and 
some knowledge of the sun ; neither can you 
have true morals without this upward glance, 
without some perception of the moral Ideal, 
that Divine perfection which is the light of all 
our seeing. Theology is moral astronomy, in- 
dispensable to any true knowledge of our 
earthly life. 

How, then, does the matter stand when we 
reason from the highest and the best in human 
thought and life ? Is the derivative theory 
equal to the facts ? There is one example of 
the moral sense at its best, by which the gen- 
uineness of this theory may be easily tested. 
It is an example which sums up in its own 
perfectness the moral life of history. Jesus 



86 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

Christ — by disciples who knew Him most in- 
timately, and by His Church unto this day, 
owned and adored as the Lord from heaven — 
is reverenced by the common consent of the 
pure in heart as the most perfect man. He is 
man come fully to himself, the Head of the 
race. He is the human soul in its best mo- 
ments, and most Divine life. He is the relig- 
ious nature of man at its highest growth — 
love fully blossomed, and conscience perfectly 
ripe. There is a wonderful clearness and cer- 
tainty in His moral judgments. In an age of 
intellectual drift and of universal fog, always 
around the little company of which He is the 
centre, there is clear, sunny certainty. In His 
own consciousness nothing seems to be con- 
fused, or blurred ; but all His thoughts come 
to him as truths from the Father. Jesus 
Christ never was afraid, never hesitated, never 
doubted. His self-consciousness was to the 
troubled hearts of the disciples what a rare, 
cloudless day in June is to a day of April 
showers. " In Him,'' says the disciple who 
knew him best, " was light." 

This one human mind, possessed of clear, 
sunny self-knowledge, it is noticeable, was less 
than all men who have ever thought or 
spoken the outcome of the life of his age. 
As no other, He lived His own life ; thought 
His own thought ; and finished His own work 



THE MORAL SENSE, 87 

among men. One might as reasonably assert 
that the rock of St. Helena was evolved out 
of the waves and a change in the weather, as 
imagine that the substantial and exalted faiths 
of Jesus and His disciples were but the pro- 
ducts of the meeting currents and changing 
fortunes of the world, against which they stood 
up with their firm certainties. Modern science 
chooses as its guiding faith the law of contin- 
uity; by which is meant, in plain English, 
the fact that nature is of one piece — no thread 
is ever broken in her weaving, and every 
force works on without stop or jar. But the 
law of the continuity of mental and moral 
forces would be snapped, and history made a 
strange patchwork, if we were to suppose that 
the mind that was in Judaism ever produced 
the mind that was in Jesus. When I can see 
a rose growing in the desert, and forming its 
depths of pure color out of the grains of yel- 
low sand ; when I can see a wheat field ripen- 
ing in the furrows of the salt waves ; when I 
can believe that the villagers among the hills 
of New Hampshire with their wagons and pick- 
axes gathered the stones, and heaped up the 
massive peak of Mount Washington ; then, 
but not till then, can I believe that the 
thoughts of the disciples invented the deeds 
and the glory of Jesus, the Christ ; — whose 
beatitudes shed the fragrance of a new spirit 



88 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

over the wastes of Pharisaism ; whose fruitful 
life, in the midst of sin and raging passion, 
grew in grace and favor with God and man ; 
the Christ, whose glorious majesty, still un- 
equaled and inimitable, looks down upon our 
low estate, and proclaims itself to be the 
mighty work of God ! 

There seem to be three ultimates of our 
verifiable knowledge, three fixed facts of 
human experience, beyond which we cannot 
go ; and these three are, on the one side, mat- 
ter and force ; and on the other, the character 
of Jesus Christ. Physics cannot carry us 
beyond the former ; and moral history leaves 
us before the latter as its last, grandest, and 
enduring fact. 

What, then, as judged by this ultimate mor- 
al fact of history, the character of Jesus, be- 
comes of the theory that duty is only another 
name for the social instinct ? What in the 
light of that pure moral consciousness which 
reveals what is in men (the true, that is, the 
original, underived light which lighteth every 
man that cometh into the world) becomes of 
the supposition that goodness is only another 
form of earthliness ? Certainly the impression 
which that life, full of grace and truth, made 
upon the minds of those who beheld it, was 
the impression of a soul aglow with a Divine 
love, and self -moved along a path high as the 



THE MORAL SENSE. 89 

heavens from the earth above the selfish 
thoughts of disciples desirous of thrones ! 
His was a life of faith, with all the kingdoms 
of the world in sight ! That the sense of duty, 
as it was remnant in the life of Jesus of Naza- 
reth, was not a sense of something worthier 
and more divine than the social instincts of 
bees, and birds, and men ; something more 
commanding than self-interest ; something more 
august and more enduring than the record in 
the changing brain of experiences of the hurtful 
or the useful ; — this, he would.be indeed a bold 
theorist to assert in view of that life of obedi- 
ence, and before the Cross ! But to this test of 
the character of the perfect man the derivative 
theory of virtue must be brought, as all the 
deeper questions of modern thought, followed 
to their end, lead into the one great question 
of the ages, What think ye of Christ? " The 
Descent of Man " must answer also for " The 
Descent of the Son of Man." Herbert Spencer 
must not only reason us out of our moral senses, 
but also hold up his u Psychology " as true to 
the consciousness of the perfect man. You 
are the resultant of the experiences, impressed 
upon the brain of a suffering and unsuccessful 
people, of the utility of virtue and the joy of 
religion — Herbert Spencer must say boldly to 
Jesus, or his " Psychology " breaks utterly down. 
Your sacrament of the broken body and the 



90 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

blood which is shed, is but the symbol of that 
physical mystery of the ages which, working by 
a blind impulse, produced man, and made him 
love society, and choose happiness as his chief 
good — this, the denier of the divinity of man's 
moral nature must say unabashed to Him who 
gave His life a ransom for many, or else, in view 
of His Cross, trample his theory of morals in- 
to the dust from whence he got it. Either 
the social instinct and the experience of utility 
are ample to explain the wonderful moral 
consciousness of the Christ, or they are insuf- 
ficient to account for the life of the least of 
his brethren. There is no escape from this di- 
lemma. One after another the noblest charac- 
ters, and at last Jesus himself, must be reduced 
to common clay, of this earth earthy ; or the 
theory is ruined. But Jesus' question to her 
who understood not the beginning of his min- 
istry, reveals the secret of his finished work : 
" Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's 
business ? " Jesus' account of his own moral # 
consciousness alone is equal to the fact of his 
life ; his inward sense of oneness with the 
Father alone is sufficient to explain his out- 
ward ministry. The mind that was in Jesus 
is above any earthly origin. It bears the im- 
age of the heavenly. 

Conscience, therefore, if judged by the rev- 
elation of its nature in the humanity of Him 



THE MORAL SENSE. 9 1 

to whom, by the general consent of the good 
and the voice of the ages, is given a name above 
every name, is an original and essential element 
of man's being, without descent or beginning 
of days, — like Melchisedek, priest of the Most 
High God. 

The spirits that have been most like the Son 
of man, like him appear to bear the image not 
of the earthly, but of the heavenly. In their 
toils and sacrifices they followed duty as the 
very angel of God's presence; and the mar- 
tyrs of the Church never dreamed that it was 
only a transformed social instinct which led 
them from their homes into dungeons and 
through the flames. Of all noble, disinterested, 
or heroic lives, Herbert Spencer's accumulation 
of experiences of utility is no more an explana- 
tion than the heap of sand thrown up as a 
breastwork upon which the soldier dies, is an 
explanation of the patriotism which inspired 
the daring charge ! 

The theory of the derivation of the moral 
sense from non-moral sources through the 
social instinct, including sympathy, is as yet 
only theory. Whatever supports may be found 
for this frail theory in physical analogies,- 
whatever points of attachment may be pro- 
vided for it in the general scheme of evolution- 
ary philosophy ; the actual process of growth 
from the non-moral to the moral has never 



92 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

been discovered ; and to reason from the sup- 
posed possibility of the theor}^ to the fact of it, 
would be like saying — I have lattice-work by 
my door upon which a honeysuckle may grow, 
therefore I have a honeysuckle. The theory 
of the evolutionists has in it a place prepared 
for the growth of the fruits of the Spirit from 
that which is sown to the flesh, as it has a 
place prepared for the production of living out 
of non-living matter — but does it find the fact 
where the theory is waiting for it ? Natural- 
ists generally admit that living matter has nev- 
er yet been produced, to our knowledge, out 
of non-living matter ; and the case is no better 
for the theory with regard to the change of 
non-moral into moral consciousness. The ob- 
jection urged by Herbert Spencer against the 
view of a special creation, changing only the 
words, may with equal, if not better logic be 
urged against his own view of the origin of 
the moral sense : " No one ever saw a special 
creation ;' no one ever found proof of an indi- 
rect kind that a special creation had taken 
place. It is significant, as Dr. Hooker remarks, 
that naturalists who suppose new species to be 
miraculously originated, habitually suppose 
the origination to occur in some region remote 
from human observation." * But neither ob- 



; Principles of Biology," vol. i., p. 336. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 93 

serration nor memory reveal the moral sense 
in tlie process of change from the social in- 
stinct. The transformation, if it took place 
at all, must have occurred in some nebulous 
condition of the human soul. Language has 
no record, even among its oldest fossil forms, 
of the transition. But language is the first 
transcript of the human soul, the witness, be- 
fore philosophies were born, to that which 
is in man. Its testimony to the distinct and 
separate character of the moral sense is une- 
quivocal. Moreover, the closest observation 
of those forms of human life most akin to the 
brute discloses no transitional forms between 
non-moral and moral life. In a volume justly 
regarded of the highest authority as a manual 
of ethnology, Prof. Oscar Peschel remarks : 
" To the question, whether in any part of the 
world a nation has ever been found utterly 
destitute of religious emotions and ideas, we 
will venture to give a decided negative." * 
Even Mr. Xylor, f with his philosophic bias 
towards the opposite conclusion, is candid 
enough to write, with regard to the question 
whether any tribe has been found without 
religion : " Though the theoretical niche is 
ready and convenient, the actual statue to fill 
it is not forthcoming. The case is, in some de- 

* "The Baces of Men," p. 261. 

\ " Primitive Culture," vol. i., p. 418. 



94 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

gree, similar to that of the tribes asserted tc 
exist without language, or without the use of 
fire ; nothing in the nature of things seems to 
foibid the possibility of such existence, but, 
as a matter of fact, the tribes are not found." 
The derivative, or monistic, theory puts the 
required passage from animal to moral and re- 
ligious life beyond experience, before history, 
without the limits of scientific demonstration ! 
Not even a tradition of this marvelous change 
has floated down into history ! 

At the farthest range of his microscope 
Haeckel still finds " monera " living and 
swarming among the inert atoms. Biology 
recently reduced life to its lowest terms in the 
cell. Now it has penetrated through the 
formed wall to the living centre of the cell. 
But the point where its inward glance stops 
is still life. One single cell-centre, one bit of 
that finely -granulated albumen, which is life's 
last material hiding-place, if it could but be 
made in the laboratory, would be a fact worth 
more to the radical school, at least, of the 
evolutionists than all the volumes which they 
have ever written in advocacy of their views ; 
but that one bit of life has never been made. 
In like manner, at the farthest end of our 
most microscopic moral analysis, we still find 
these living moral facts. One instance of a 
conscience alive to right and wrong formed 



THE MORAL SENSE. 95 

out of non-moral matter ; one instance of a 
real moral judgment coming to life out of 
purely animal instincts, would be worth more 
to Mr. Darwin than many pages of analogies ; 
but that instance is yet to be discovered. The 
whole theory circles still in the air, without- a 
solitary fact upon which to alight, and to stay 
undisturbed. Nor is this all. We have not 
taken into view as yet certain well-known 
classes of facts which give this theory no rest. 
Not only does it fail to find, in the whole 
compass of our knowledge, sufficient facts 
upon which to build its pretensions, but also 
there are facts of common experience which 
seem, to be the natural enemies of any such 
theory. One of these is the fact of moral 
freedom. The derivative theory is pursued, 
wherever it gains lodgment, by the belief in 
moral freedom, which has prior possession of 
all men's hearts. Mr. Spencer has made his 
philosophy into an Ishmael, against whom is 
every man's hand, by his opinion that the 
absence of moral freedom is a gain. 

Another fact directly antagonistic to this 
view is the substantial identity of the intel- 
lectual, moral, and physical nature of man 
through all varieties, and from the lowest to 
the highest races.* Mr. Darwin admits how 

* See Mivart, " Lessons from Nature," pp. 133-167 for proofs 
of this fact. Also Peschel, " The Eaces of Men," pp. 21-26. 



96 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

closely the Fuegians on board the " Beagle" 
resembled Englishmen. 

Another difficulty, right in the way of these 
theories, is the fact of moral reversion. The 
question is by no means settled what the in- 
tellectual and moral starting-point of prehis- 
toric man was ; and many facts indicative of 
moral retrogression are, to say the least, as 
Mr. Wallace puts the case, " Difficulties of 
Development as applied to man." * Another 
fact which does not fit the theory is the cir- 
cumstance that the approval of society should 
be the standard of right, if the moral sense 
were the outgrowth of the social instinct ; but 
such is not the case. A morality held to- 
gether by the restraints of social customs is 
hardly worthy of the name.f Every strong 
conscience is a daily judgment of society, and 
by its own law. Another stubborn fact 
against any theory which would reduce con- 
science to a physical impulse is the sense of 
sin. The feeling of dissatisfaction, which Mr. 
Darwin endeavors to account for by the sup- 
position of a thwarted, but persistent instinct, 
is by no means the whole strength of the con- 
demnation of the law ; it is but a single 
thread of the dark woof of the history of sin. 

* Address republished in Popular Science Monthly, Nov., 1876. 
f u Social penalties may strike the very highest forms of vir- 
tue." Lecky, " Morals," vol. i., p. 62. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 9 J 

In his account of the sense of shame, Mr. 
Spencer hardly seems to go deeper than the 
blush on the face. This whole wrong side of 
human nature is passed over too lightly by 
the advocates of the natural make of our 
moral judgments. Sin must be carefully 
studied, also, in the processes by which man's 
consciousness of it is cleansed, and in the state 
of the renewed mind towards it, in order that 
its real significance mav be understood. There 
are experiences, known to those of a broken 
and a contrite spirit, which are deeply signifi- 
cant of man's moral origin and end. The 
sense of guilt, darkening the heart, is the proof 
of conscience, the light which is in man; as 
the shadows in a room bear witness to the 
lamp from which they are thrown upon the 
wall. 

In this brief review of the reasons why we 
must refuse to consider the moral sense of 
mankind as resolved, or rather dissolved, into 
any other elements, it will be noticed that no 
direct issue has been taken with Darwinism 
upon its own ground, and considered as a pos- 
sible natural history of the world and man's 
origin. That evolution is at present the best 
working theory of natural science, we are not- 
disposed, in the interests of the religious feel- 
ing, to question. . What role the laws of natu- 
ral and sexual selection have had to play in the 
b 



98 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

process of creation, is hardly a question of 
moral philosophy. But that evolution, as at 
present exalted by Herbert Spencer into an uni- 
versal law and comprehensive philosophy, fails 
to satisfy many minds, at points where they 
are best fitted to judge, admits also of no ques- 
tion. Physics, chemistry, mental science, and 
ethics, each and all present facts hard to cover 
with this broad generalization, though we 
stretch it to the utmost. * But this point it 
does not concern us now to argue. Still less 
have we occasion to dispute with naturalists 
over their own discoveries. It may be, as 
they say, our eyes are better organized to see 
the gaps in the development than the fine line 
which to them seems to thread upon one law 
all known facts. And those theologians who 



* For a statement of some of these objections, see recent 
articles on Automatism and Evolution in the Contemporary 
Keview, September. October, and December, 1876, We find it 
difficult to accept Prof. Huxley's dictum that evolution is demon- 
strated truth, when he himself, at the close of his last address in 
this country, avoids, by rhetorical dexterity, Sir Wm. Thompson's 
reasonings as to the probable age of the earth. (See lectures on 
"Advances in Physical Science," by Prof. Tait, p. 167.) In 
contrast with Prof. Huxley's claim, these words of Mr. Wallace 
seem to possess more of the modesty of true science. " How- 
ever great may have been the intellectual triumphs of the nine- 
teenth century, we can hardly think so highly of its achievements 
as to imagine that, in somewhat less than twenty years, we have 
passed from complete ignorance to almost perfect knowledge on 
two such vast and complex subjects as the origin of species and 
the antiquity of man." For a summary of difficulties see Ulriei, 
u Gott und Mensch.," Bd. i., pp. 83-115. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 99 

may have learned in tlieir own domain the 
evil of dogmatism, will be the last needlessly 
to expose themselves to that scientific intol- 
erance which, claiming for itself an esoteric 
initiation into nature's mysteries, has only 
words of contempt for those who presume to 
question its oracles. We do not wish to be 
numbered among Mr. Huxley's " strangled 
snakes" around the cradle of knowledge,* nor 
to be considered by the gentle and modest Dr. 
Biichner f " mental slaves," " yelping curs," 
" speculative idiots." We would rather try 
to accomplish Mr. Huxley's great feat of met- 
aphysical jugglery, and regard ourselves as 
automatons endowed with free will ! But 
when a doctrine of evolution, whatever may be 
its claim as mere physics, becomes an all- 
devouring moral and metaphysical doctrine — 
is advanced, in short, as scientific theology, 
claiming lordship over conscience and the re- 
ligious sentiment ; then there are certain logi- 
cal laws, certain natural principles, certain 
maxims of common sense, by which men who 
may not be scientific, but who are reasonable 
beings, will rigorously examine its claims. 
"To judge of the soundness of scientific data, 
and to reason from data assumed to be 
sound," Prof. Tyndall justly remarks, " are 

* "Lay Sermons," p. 278. 

t " Kraft und Stoff," Preface, p. 86, as quoted in Cont. Rev. 



IOO THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

two totally different things." This derivative 
theory of man's moral nature, confessedly 
resting upon no experimental facts, but only 
upon general inferences, cannot, on the plea of 
scientific immunity from reasoners not used to 
the microscope, escape the grasp of a rigorous 
logic. One of the laws of sound reasoning, 
by which it is to be weighed, is the adequacy 
of the forces to the results produced. An- 
other is the similarity of the cause to the 
effect, or the law, so ably expounded by Mr. 
Mill, that the sum of the antecedents in causa- 
tion must be equal to the consequent. The 
logical equation is all wrong, if there is more 
on the side of the effects than on the side of 
the causes; and if known quantities are not 
sufficient, logic requires the writing upon the 
causal side of the equation an unknown x. 
Whatever comes out of one end of the pro- 
cess of evolution must have entered into it 
from some point from without. You cannot 
account for a piece of rich silk appearing at 
one end of a pneumatic tube, by showing the 
invoice of a white cotton fabric put in at the 
other end. The matter would not be helped 
by supposing that the tube reached across a 
continent, instead of under the avenue of a 
city. If intelligence and conscience come out 
at one end of the evolution, they must have 
gone into it at the other end ; the change of 



THE MORAL SENSE. ioi 

color and substance is not explained simply 
by supposing the evolution to have run 
through millions of years instead of through 
a few centuries. 

Or, if it be said, the change of color and 
substance is due to " the incident forces," to 
which the matter which has become mind has 
been subjected, the difficulty is only pushed a 
step farther back. For either in the nature 
of the species, or in the " incident forces," 
must reside the causes of everything which 
appears in the developed form. Somewhere, 
then, in the process, mind and morals must 
have entered as causes, for they exist now and 
here as effects. The only logical escape is to 
reduce all diversities to one ultimate kind of 
matter, as Haeckel, in the face of appearances, 
has the boldness to do. Mr. Spencer, also, 
admits that if there had been a first organism 
it could not have derived its tendencies and 
aptitudes from inheritance, but he says that 
" evolution negatives the supposition of a first 
organism." * There exists, then, in the uni- 
verse, only multiformity, but no distinctions of 
kind; and evolution, as thus conceived, in- 
volves the metaphysical contradiction of an 
infinite recession in time. There is, therefore, 
no way of escape which does not end in vacuity 



Appendix to " Biology," vol. i. 



102 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

from the proposition that whatever exists now 
as actual and separate fact, must have existed 
before as distinct and determinate possibility. 
Whatever is realized in the fruit, must have 
been potentially in the germ. The law of 
continuity holds in metaphysics, as well as in 
physics. Prof. Tyndall's apt figure of the 
curve,* "the elements of which may be de- 
termined in a world of observation and ex- 
periment, which may be prolonged, therefore, 
into an antecedent world," holds equally in 
moral philosophy, and is a fine statement of 
an old argument for belief in the Intelligence 
before us, and after us ; whose ways from the 
beginning we cannot follow, but whose design 
is visible, running through our present experi- 
ence, and whom we know in part. 

These laws of sound reasoning and true 
scientific imagination, naturalists should not 
fail to respect when they become moral philos- 
ophers. Here is a moral nature, known and 
read of all men, differentiated by certain fixed 
and persistent peculiarities, but, on " general 
grounds " of scientific theory, said to have grown 
out of instincts that do not show any of its 
specific characters ; to have been evolved from 
matter which, so far as we have any certain 
knowledge of it, contains not the remotest possi- 



; Scientific Use of the Imagination." 



THE MORAL SENSE. 103 

bility of it. Where is the identity of the process, 
if it grew from any root but its own ? What 
becomes of the law of continuity, if gases in a 
fiery planet, indefinite cycles of ages ago, gases 
in kind like those with which we are familiar, 
have become, in these latter days, thought, aspi- 
ration, penitence, love, prayer ? 

It is not here necessarily denied that this 
whole universe grew, and is growing. It is only 
affirmed that the seeds sown in chaos must have 
been sufficient for the harvest reaped by time's 
sickle. The growth of this whole material 
system of things is in kind no more inconceiv- 
able than the growth of an oak from an acorn. 
For aught we know, the one process may be a 
miniature of the other. All the ramifications of 
this vast system of worlds, and the constella- 
tions clustered on high, may be to the germs 
of the universe as the boughs, and fruit, and 
myriad leaves of a tree are to the seed once 
hidden in the ground. Indeed, the inspired 
book of Genesis is ages before our modern 
science in the discovery that the Divine law of 
creation was to let everything bring forth after 
its kind. But there is this limitation to growth, 
which Genesis recognizes, though our science is 
prone to ignore it. Let everything bring forth 
after its Jci?id. Let the cause be equal to the 
effect ; let the effect contain no more than can 
be found in its causes. We can conceive of 



104 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

evolution in no other way ; the homogeneous 
becomes the heterogeneous, but only under this 
limitation, that what stands forth evolved in 
the heterogeneous lies involved in the homoge- 
neous. But certain moral facts are clearly 
evolved, therefore they were involved in the 
first principles of things. If the present uni- 
verse has a moral structure, as well as physical, 
there must have been working from the begin- 
ning, and throughout its course, a moral molec- 
ular force. "While naturalists are still undecided 
how many distinct physical elements must be 
granted in order to account for existing chemi- 
cal combinations — and Mr. Spencer * bases his 
generalizations upon the mere supposition that 
they can reduce them to one — surely among 
the sixty-three, or more, demanded by physics, 
we may be allowed to claim another element 
for the construction of mind, spirit, and con- 
science, since these three differ in kind immeas- 
urably more from material quantities than 
oxygen differs from hydrogen, or carbon from 
gold. Unless, therefore, it can be shown that 
in the fully developed moral consciousness of 
the race the moral sense, and the resulting 
moral judgments, can be logically derived from 
other motives ; can be resolved by accurate 
analysis into other feelings and ideas — and 



" Principles of Psychology," vol. i., p. 155. 



THE MORAL SENSE. 105 

this Mr. Darwin does not in his chapter attempt 
to do, and, as we have just shown, this can be 
done only by a confusion of the facts of con- 
sciousness — it will avail nothing to put its 
origin back in some unknown past, and to sup- 
pose that in some condition antecedent to ex- 
perience this miraculous conversion of one sub- 
stance into another substance took place. At 
whatever time in the world's formation, at 
whatever stage of human growth, conscience 
emerges, it appears as conscience ; and its 
peculiarity as conscience must be referred to 
some moral tendency originally existing in, 
and forming an integral part of the very 
germs, or primal forms of life. Somewhere 
in the descent of man, as at several obvious 
points in the arguments of the materialists, 
there must have slipped into the process of 
evolution the " promise and the potency " of a 
higher life, which, ever clearing itself of earthli- 
ness, in the fulness of time is made perfect in 
the Son of Man. 

As this universe exists at present in two 
kinds, so we are like the Roman priests in their 
pride, if we will allow it to be administered 
only in one kind. Matter and spirit, nature 
and conscience, together form the true sacra- 
ment of the Creator's institution, and to deny 
either is to profane His bequest. 
5* 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE PERCEPTIONS IK THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

We are now prepared for a step in advance. 
The religious feeling, like tlie feeling of exist- 
ence, is a primary source of experience to be 
derived from nothing before itself. But does 
the religious feeling involve a religious per- 
ception ? All sensation seems to involve per- 
ception. From the feeling of existence is 
evolved the knowledge of existence, though, 
perhaps, a considerable period of infancy may 
be required for the new feeling of existence 
to take form in the definite consciousness of a 
personal soul. Thus, also, our bodily sensa- 
tions give rise to the perceptions of objective 
phenomena; and these sense-perceptions are 
the starting-points of all science. But does 
the religious feeling, likewise, yield immedi- 
ately a religious perception ? Is it in the same 
manner a source of knowledge ? 

The process by which the mind arrives at 
knowledge, generally speaking, may be said 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION, 1 07 

to run through the following stages : — first, 
sensation ; second, perception ; third, the de- 
fining the sense-perception by means of other 
perceptions, or the forming the idea of a 
thing; fourth, the combination of ideas in a 
judgment ; and, finally, the verification of 
ideas so formed either by various combina- 
tions of them (deductive reasoning), or by 
returning to their sources, and starting from . 
renewed observation of phenomena (induc- 
tive reasoning). 

Is theology a knowledge of God to be 
gained and verified by similar processes, and 
on the same principles, by which we arrive at 
our other knowledges ? I maintain that the 
religious feeling involves perception, and is, 
therefore, the valid source of theology. More 
than this, I maintain that the ideas gained 
primarily through the feeling of absolute de- 
pendence are the conditions of all ordered, or 
scientific knowledge. * Had man not been 
organized first for God, he would not have 
been organized for knowledge of the creation. 

* Mtsch (" System der Christ. Lehre," p. 25) maintains : u The 
feeling (Das Gefiihl) has reason and is reason, and the felt con- 
sciousness of God produces out of itself ground-perceptions 
... by virtue of which before all scientific mediation it can 
rule and condition the whole domain of conceptions." Similarly 
Ulrici( u Gott undMensch.," I., 2d. Th., p. 242) urges that the 
religious feeling is the necessary condition of all knowledge 
without which we could not rise above the level of the brute. 
See, also, Lotze, "Mikrokosmus," Bd. 3, p. 549. 



T.o8 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

Science, to a person without religious endow- 
ment, would be impossible, as it is to the 
brute. The religious power I hold to be the 
" primum mobile " of human thought. With- 
out the God-consciousness, self-consciousness 
can never be fully realized. Man rises above 
the animal, and becomes human, only through 
his power of spiritual perception. Man can 
f ornr the idea of himself as man only in and 
through the sense of his relationship to the 
Father of all spirits. So far from religion 
being opposed to science, science cannot exist 
at all among beings incapable of religion. 

That these are not mere assertions, we are 
confident a fair comparison of the processes 
of religious and scientific knowledge will 
make clear. The manner of the mind's pro- 
cedure is similar in both kinds of knowledge ; 
the principles upon which it becomes certain 
of its conclusions are identical ; and faith in 
the one process requires faith also in the 
other. Scientific and religious knowledge 
stand or fall together, with the trustworthi- 
ness of our mental faculties. We cannot 
with logical consistency be toward the one 
half of our consciousness infidels, and toward 
the other half believers. 

If we subject our two kinds of knowledge 
to the comparison just indicated, we shall ob- 
serve that the perception given through the 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION. 1 09 

religious feeling exists, at first, in an unde- 
fined and general form, precisely as tlie first 
perception of existence is a vague feeling of 
life. In the religious consciousness the gen- 
eral law, enunciated by Sir ¥m. Hamilton, * 
holds true, that sensation and perception, 
though each involves the other, exist in in- 
verse ratio. Sensation and perception, in gen- 
eral, seem to hold very much the same rela- 
tion to each other, as that found to exist be- 
tween heat and light ; the difference between 
which is only one of degree, or in the length 
or quickness of the vibrations. In the relig- 
ious consciousness, feeling and thought, zeal 
and knowledge, are similarly related — the 
emotion giving rise to a clear perception of 
truth, or the truth passing again into a glow 
of heat. Each may not at the same moment 
be at its greatest intensity. The one is nat- 
ure's relief of the other. 

The earliest recognizable transition, or ad- 
vance, from the feeling of absolute depend- 
ence toward perception is found in the mental 
phenomena of wonder, fear, awe. Through 
these half -felt, half -thought states of conscious- 
ness the idea of a Divine reality begins to be 
shadowed forth in the mind. They are the 
soul's feelings of the "not ourselves upon 

* u Lectures on Metaphysics," p. 336. See Spencer, " Psy 
chology," vol. i., pp. 246-251. 



IIO THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

which we are dependent" in the process of 
change into the distinct conception of an Al- 
mighty God. They are neither simple feel- 
ing, nor pure thought, but a commingling of 
both — the soul's first sense perception, as it 
were, of the Infinite One. These two, wonder 
and fear, aire among our earliest recollections of 
life, as they are universal human experiences. 
Our childhood was a daily wonder. We play- 
ed in the fields, and wondered what made the 
grasses grow. We looked out at the flying 
snow-flakes, and wondered where the winds 
found them. - We looked at the twinkling 
stars, and wondered what they were. And 
with the years the wonder has not passed 
from earth or sky. Time itself is but an hour's 
wonder between two eternities. Things around 
us grown most common seem at times possess- 
ed of strange secrets, which we cannot spell. 
Our little circle of knowledge is as a mere isl- 
and surrounded, wherever we turn, by an 
unknown sea. Every path of thought leads 
soon to the boundless wonder, in the midst of 
which we dwell ; our most familiar knowledge 
in the light of which we walk, is only as a 
day between two nights; out of darkness it 
comes, and in darkness it ends. Wordsworth's 
ode, "Intimations of Immortality," stirs the 
soul, like a trumpet-call, because it awak- 
ens this wondering memory and first sense 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION, III 

of truth which we are toiling all our lives to 
find : 

* ' Those obstinate questionings 

Of sense and outward things, 

Fallings from us, vanishings, 

Blank misgivings of a creature 

Moving about in worlds not realized, 

High instincts, before which our mortal nature 

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised. ,, 

The sense of wonder may have become to us, 
at certain hours, a sense of painful craving 
for certainty ; — of our first faiths only the 
power to doubt may, at times, seem left. 
Doubts, which fell lightly upon the joyous- 
ness of youth, as the shadows of morning lie 
upon the sunshine among the trees, have since 
lengthened and deepened, perhaps, into a felt 
and painful darkness, a mystery enveloping 
all things, making us feel lost even in familiar 
paths, and causing w T ell-known objects to look 
weird and strange. What does it all mean ? 
What are we here for? Who are we? Who 
cares for us ? Is it all a vast and brazen hollow- 
ness ? Is there beneath appearances a heart of 
things, real as our own only infinitely more 
human, true, changeless, full of goodness — per- 
fect love ? 

With the vague wonder steals over us, also, 
the nameless dread. Our hearts tremble at 
themselves. There is a dread which seems to 
be the reflex of our own consciousness of spirit- 



112 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

ual being. It is not fear of anything known. It 
is not dread of any physical suffering. It is 
not a shrinking of heart from any seen or 
fancied peril. This sense of fear surprises lis 
in our quietest hours ; often it conies over us, 
like the shadow of another world, when we 
are far from men, walking in the sunny mead- 
ows, looking up into the deep blue eye of the 
sky, or as we stand upon some cliff, self -forget- 
ful, — the ocean before us, overcoming thought 
with the feeling of something measureless and 
infinite ! This dim sense of reality more than 
our minds can conceive ; this surprise of soul 
at its own mysterious being ; this shrinking of 
spirit from passing vision of God too bright 
for it, is by no means an unusual experience, 
nor is it confined to those of naturally poetic 
temperament, or quick sensibility. There are 
few, if any, who have never felt their hearts 
tremble from the passing by of a Higher Pres- 
ence, whose ways they know not of. And even 
that stout-hearted positivist, Prof. Tyndall, 
confesses to moments of moral questionings 
and weakness; and, as he stood upon the 
crumbling summit of the Matterhorn, seems to 
have been deeply awed by thoughts which came 
to him not through generalizations of h is science, 
but from that human heart by whicli we live, 
which in him, as in Wordsworth, and in us all, 
oft wakes thoughts that lie too deep for tears. 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION. 113 

If now we seek to arrest, for a moment, in our 
understandings these evanescent feelings, they 
betray — do they not? — the first motions, at 
least, of the forming idea of God, the undefined 
revelation of the Infinite One. As these emo- 
tions have found utterance in poetry, as they 
have entered into literature, as they color our 
thoughts and brighten our lives, they are seen 
to be dawnings upon us of Divinity. They 
are u Intimations of Immortality," suggestions 
of something Divine ! From them the thought 
of God seems always to be coming to us. As 
they vanish, they leave us thinking of Him. 
We seem to ourselves as strangers and pil- 
grims here. We feel alone in an alien world ; — 
the soul wandering in orphanage of spirit, it 
knows not whither ; trembling with the half- 
conscious sense of its own higher birthright, 
but finding; nowhere in nature recognition of 
its Divine childhood, or gleam of light from 
its home. Amid these rude powers of nature, 
which caress us only at last to destroy us, we 
feel ourselves to be castaways ; and, though we 
succeed in propitiating for a season the powers 
of this world, into whose hands we have fallen, 
and win a little enjoyment from the hard servi- 
tude of nature, we do not forget wholly the 
soul's wondering reminiscence of its Father's 
house ; we do not lose wholly from our hopes 
and fears the longing for a heavenly home. 



114 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

The stepping forth into consciousness of 
some idea of God from the feeling of absolute 
dependence through these feeling-perceptions 
of the supreme Reality, is not, let it be noticed, 
simply your experience, or my experience ; is 
not a merely individual process of belief ; but 
it is a general, or distinctively human phenome- 
non. For this feeling-perception of supersen- 
sible things is the originating cause of all 
mythologies, as it has been the persistent force 
of religious faith. Mr. Maurice,* from an anal- 
ysis of the actual products of belief in the 
Homeric times, has reached the conclusion 
that a sense of human relationship, particularly 
the relation of father and son, was at the source 
of the Greek religion. Prof. Ulrici f main- 
tains that the more recent investigations show 
that "the manifold nature-religions (so call- 
ed), from Shamanism and Fetichism, up to the 
most developed mythological systems, in the 
last ground do not rest, as has commonly been 
supposed, upon an immediate deification of ob- 
jects, or powers of nature, but have gone 
forth from a perception of the Divine in gen- 
eral, though perfectly dim and undefined, a 
Power and nature working behind appear- 



* " Social Morality," pp. 91-101. 

f " G-ott und der Mensch.," 1, 2, p. 427. Herbert Spencer, in his 
" Sociology," presents facts really confirmative of this view, as he 
endeavors to reduce all religious sentiments to ancestor- worship. 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION. 1 15 

ances." Reason lias had everything to do in 
giving form and shape to the conception of 
Divinity ; but, as matter of fact and history, 
it has no more created in the human mind the 
idea of God than it has created the belief that 
we are sons and have fathers. We exist in re- 
lationship to the Father. We come to our- 
selves in this Divine kinship. It is the truth 
of life into which we are born, and as the 
eye does not make the light in which it sees, 
neither does Reason make the Truth in which 
it begins to distinguish realities. 

In the process of the evolution of ideas of 
the Godhead from the human sense of depend- 
ence, these first recognizable forms of feeling- 
perception, wonder and fear, are familiar his- 
torical facts. The early religious consciousness 
of man, the childhood of religions can by no 
other words be so truly described. Our Aryan 
ancestors were wonderers, then Worshippers. 
It is a fact so well known, as to render any 
citation of proof a work of supererogation, 
that objects most wondered at, and most 
dreaded, are regarded as objects of worship 
among savages. But if the growth of relig- 
ious ideas be arrested in their first stages of 
formation — if the latent perceptions of the sur- 
rounding Divinity involved in these feelings 
are not unfolded into clear ideas, and through 
a pi icess of thought a higher worship reached 



Il6 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

— then of necessity tlie religions faith of a peo- 
ple will be bnt as a germ of truth infolded in 
superstitions. Early religions ideas may be 
false or grotesque, as the perceptions of a lit- 
tle child would convey a foolish conception of 
the world; but, as the absurdities of the child's 
notions of things form no argument against the 
validity of perception, so the idolatries of un- 
developed religions are no evidence against the 
trustworthiness of the sense of Divinity. 

But does the evolution of the religious con- 
sciousness necessarily stop with these vague 
results? Beyond a superstitious worship, 
springing from these sentiments, the religious 
growth of some tribes seems hardly to have 
advanced. With others the fear of God has 
been the beginning of wisdom. Some modern 
thinkers would bring all science and all reve 
lation, the whole progressive manifestation of 
God to man, back to these first sentiments 
of religion. We can have, they hold, no more 
definite conceptions of the Inscrutable Power. 
God, after all the searchings of the centuries, 
if haply he may be found, is still the Unknown 
and Unknowable Power, whose influence the 
savage fears in everything that causes him pain, 
whose inconceivable presence the philosopher * 

* The prototype of Herbert Spencer has been discovered in an 
ancient Mexican king who worshipped an "Unknown God under the 
name of Cause of Causes. (Peschel, " Races," p. 247.) Perhaps a 
circle is now the best definition of progress. 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION. 117 

supposes to be beneath all natural forces and 
laws — the dread Power to whom it is useless 
to pray, and before whom it is our highest 
wisdom ignorantly to worship. 

But must the formation of religious concep- 
tions from our general sense of God stop with 
these abstractions ? Does it, as matter of fact, 
as it actually works in human consciousness, 
as it is carried on through human history, 
stop with this barren and useless conception 
of Deity — an idea of God wilich makes Him 
less, not more, than humanity ? The impulses 
of the religious feeling are not and cannot be 
checked in these first intimations of the Infinite. 
The contact of the soul with the Reality in 
which it lives awakens it to something better 
and more satisfying than these dreams of 
Divinity. The touch of the finger of God 
arouses all its powers. The felt presence and 
nearness of God incites the soul to ideas, and 
reasonings, and efforts of thought, which lift 
it to a far higher conception of Him than its 
first dim sense of Deity ; though they leave 
the mind, when most full of light, still won- 
dering and worshipping before the glory that 
passes knowledge. Let us observe carefully 
this further evolution of the knowledge of 
God from the first feeling-perception of the 
presence of his Spirit. 

It is a profoundly suggestive remark of 



Il8 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

Nitsch,* that " the religious consciousness per- 
fects and justifies itself, when, in tlie immedi- 
ate life of the spirit, the contents of the orig- 
inal feeling of God (Gottesgeftihl) objectifies 
itself in a constant manner." His meaning 
may be made obvious by reference to our per- 
ceptions of external things. Every time we 
look at any given object, as a star, the same im- 
age regularly repeats itself in the eye. When- 
ever we feel resistance to our sense of touch, as 
when we lay our hand upon a table, the same 
conception of an external object is formed in 
the mind. The process from our sensations to 
our perceptions of things takes place in a con- 
stant manner. If it should fail to do so, we 
should distrust, at once, our senses. This reg- 
ular action between sensation and perception 
is broken in our dreams, when pressure on a 
particular nerve, for instance, may call forth 
a succession of incongruous mental images. 
But we should have no valid knowledge of an 
external world, were not the relations between 
our sensations and our ideas of things gener- 
ally uniform and constant. So it is with re- 
gard to spiritual vision, or our belief in super- 
sensible things. If the ideas which arise in 
the mind from its sense of dependence are capri- 
cious — now one thing, now another; if there- 



System der Christ. -Lehre," p. 25. 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION. 119 

ligious feeling does not awaken invariably in 
thought the same ideas — then it may be all 
hallucination, a dream of the soul to which no 
reality corresponds. But if, on the other hand, 
the process from feeling to ideas is a constant 
one ; if the religious consciousness in ourselves, 
and in others, always produces certain neces- 
sary ideas ; then, as in the parallel case of 
sense-perception, such uniformity is evidence 
that we are not deceived in our belief in 
the Divine reality without us. Our argu- 
ment must stop short, therefore, convicted of 
delusion, unless certain ideas can be shown 
to be the uniform results, in thought, from 
our feeling of absolute dependence. Bat 
these constant products of the religious sense 
are at hand. They are known as the intui- 
tions. 

Our next step, therefore, must be to trace 
the relation, so far as we may, between the re- 
ligious feeling and its intuitions. That the in- 
tuitions are constant ideas, in all minds the 
same, is unquestionable. All men think from 
these fixed starting-j)oints. They are the axi- 
oms of common sense, as well as the first prin- 
ciples of science. One of these fixed points of 
light in our mental firmament is the idea of 
cause. What, then, is the relation between the 
idea of cause and the religious feeling ? We 
feel ourselves to be dependent beings, and we at 



120 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

once think of ourselves as caused beings. "We 
become aware of ourselves as limited or finite, 
and immediately perceive ourselves to have 
been made. The sense of dependence, that is 
to say, immediately and uniformly, is convert- 
ed in thought into the idea of cause and effect. 
There is no intermediate process, or course of 
reflection, between the feeling of dependence 
and the idea of cause. The latter is the men- 
tal translation of the former, spontaneous and 
necessary, as is the translation of sensation in- 
to the perception of an external world. The 
idea of dause, coming forth directly from the 
feeling of dependence, becomes at once a law 
of thought, and it conditions all subsequent ex- 
perience. We call it a first truth — that is, one 
which all the other truths hold in reverence 
as older than they, the first-born of them all. 

By their opinion concerning the law of 
causality, philosophers, generally speaking, are 
divided into two great schools — the experi- 
mental and the intuitive.* It would be di- 
gressing too far from our present object to fol- 
low one after another the reasonings of the for- 
mer into the difficulties upon which they have 
been driven by their opponents. They explain 
the law of causation by explaining it away. It 
is not easy to see how the law of causality, 

* Hamilton, "Metaphysics," p. 540, gives these two general divi- 
sions, and eight subdivisions of views concerning causality. 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION, 121 

which conditions all experience, can itself be 
the product of experience. The experience 
which, it is alleged, leads to the general con- 
clusion that every effect has a cause, presup- 
poses the existence in the mind of the idea of 
cause and effect, as every process of reasoning 
implies the previous existence in the mind of 
the idea to be demonstrated. The succession 
of events in time * may suggest, though not ne- 
cessarily, the idea of a causal relation to a 
mind already possessed of the conception of 
power, or cause. But mere juxtaposition in 
time or space is not of itself a causal relation. 
The fact that the letter A invariably precedes 
B in the alphabet does not lead the child to 
imagine that A is the cause of B ; neither does 
the circumstance that in the order of nature 
one event uniformly precedes another, origi- 
nate the judgment that every event must have 
a cause. 

For these reasons, and others, which go to 
show the specific difference between the idea 
of cause and any generalization from expe- 
rience, the intuitional philosophy generally 
commands the assent of minds to whom dis- 



* Succession in time and the causal relation are regarded as the 
same by uncivilized nations of weak intellectual power (See Pesch- 
el, "Races," p. 246). Is it then the last word of intelligence to 
reduce causation to association ? " Time," Lotze well says, " is no 
more an element of causality than space is of motion ; it is the 
form of its appearance." 
6 



122 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

tinctions of ideas are real distinctions, which 
are no more to be confounded in mental 
science than the elemental proportions are to 
be in chemical science. The intuitional school 
accepts the law of causality, as a fact, in its 
integrity ; but usually attempts to render no 
account of its origin. That is true which can 
be distinctly seen. Intuitions are our first 
clear ideas; they are the last truths defined 
on the horizon of our mental vision ; and' to 
look beyond them, the Intuitionalists would 
say, is to gaze into haze and vacuity. 

Some psychological account of the origin 
of intuitive ideas seems, however, to be nec- 
essary to a rational confidence in them, es- 
pecially as the tendency of thought in our 
days is to inquire into the genealogy of every 
existing thing. To say that intuitions are intui- 
tions, our first fixed and clear ideas, is to utter 
a general truth of consciousness, but not the 
whole truth concerning them. For not only 
may certain first truths be recognized, but also 
the manner of their appearance may be ob- 
served. These points of light, in our con- 
sciousness, may be fixed, and also the direction 
may be determined in which they emerged 
from the surrounding mystery. The intui- 
tional philosophy has hardly completed its task 
until it has attempted, at least, to divine from 
whence, and how, these first truths come out 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION. 123 



into clear knowledge. Writers who advocate 
the j)hilosophy of common sense and clear- 
thinking, need often to take higher ground, in 
order to maintain their own strong position. 
They need to go farther back, to hold their 
own vantage-ground. The connection between 
the first perceptions and the original feeling of 
the soul cannot be ignored by one who wishes 
to secure the intuitions in his philosophy. 

The account, briefly given above, of the 
origin of the idea of cause, is an endeavor to 
follow out the intuitional philosophy in a di- 
rection which has hardly, as yet, been pursued 
to the end ; and it is justified by the following 
considerations. 

In this view, certain intuitions, like that of 
causation, do account for themselves to the 
reason. They exist first in the feeling of self 
as conditioned, or dependent; they appear 
next as perceptions of limited or caused being, 
in accordance with which, therefore, all expe- 
rience must run, and with which all experience 
is found to agree. That the idea of cause ac- 
tually has its origin in this feeling, is indicated 
by several mental phenomena. Thus, all men 
have the sense of causality, but not all have a 
definite idea of it as a law of thought. It is 
present with the child as an instinctive feeling 
long before it is clear in the mind as a distinct 
conception. The associations to which Mr. 



124 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

Mill and his followers refer for the origin of 
our intuitions, may have much to do in bring- 
ing out the idea of cause and effect from the 
child's vague sense of it; and perhaps the 
chief service of the associational philosophy 
consists in the light thrown by it, not upon the 
sources of necessary ideas, but upon the man- 
ner in which they are evolved from our experi- 
ence. The feeling from which the conception 
springs is universal and primary — the idea is 
general and secondary. All people have the 
feeling, some people more vividly than others 
have the conception of the law that every 
event must have a cause. The feeling is hu- 
man, running back beyond the child's first 
question— who made me, who made God ? — 
but the idea is philosophical, and is learned at 
school. The idea, also, may grow dim, as in 
the fears of the superstitious ; or it may be the 
light of all one's seeing, as in the scientist's 
faith in the invariable order of nature ; but 
the feeling is a constant element of experience, 
like the feeling of existence. No one ever mis- 
trusts his feeling of self as dependent or made ; 
but Mr. Mill can play fast and loose with all 
our intuitive ideas. 

The same reasoning applies, also, to several 
other intuitions, as that of the uncondition- 
ed, the infinite, the eternal. All these words 
shadow forth conceptions, more or less vague, 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION. 125 

growing immediately out of the religious feel- 
ing. In feeling and undefined perception these 
truths exist for us, rather than in thought or 
formed ideas. Here lies the way out of the 
limits of the finite between which we are shut 
in by Hamilton and Mansel. Realities may 
be felt, which can be thought only in part : as 
we may be shut in among the hills, yet per- 
ceive a sky which is not bounded by our vision, 
so may we be under the impression of the Infi- 
nite, which we cannot bring down within the 
compass of the understanding. The most 
daring flights in philosophic speculation, it is 
true, have been taken in consequence of the 
mind's impulse to reach after, and to grasp 
truths like these, which are felt and perceived, 
but which the finite understanding cannot em- 
brace and hold fast in its conceptions. But 
we may feel realities too great for thought. 
We may have some perception of our own 
mental horizon, though only what comes with- 
in that horizon line lies in the domain of the 
understanding, can be traversed, measured, 
and known. But the one exists to us as much 
as the other — the unmeasured, the uncondi* 
tioned which forms our soul's horizon — the In- 
finite, in which we feel that we exist; and the 
little world of being, easily measured, which 
we know to be ourselves. This feeling of the 
Unconditioned, or the Infinite, is implied in 



1,2 6 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

our sense of ourselves and the world as finite 
and caused existences. For the very thought 
of effects, conditions, limits, implies the feel- 
ing — at least the vague perception, of some- 
thing which is not an effect, or limited, or con- 
ditioned. Our whole reasoning rests upon this 
primal distinction, in our own feeling of exist- 
ence, of the finite from the Infinite. 

In the manner already indicated, the neces- 
sity also of these first truths is most easily con- 
ceived. Such intuitions are necessary because 
they are given in the immediate feelings of the 
spirit ; exactly as our perceptions are necessary 
because they come to us in and through our 
immediate sensations. " The necessity which 
characterizes the intuition results from the di- 
rect relation between the idea and the feeling 
from which it comes. Thus, we cannot think 
otherwise than under the law of causality, be- 
cause we cannot feel ourselves to be other than 
dependent beings. The intuitive ideas are di- 
rect reflections in thought of the feelings, the 
mind's immediate perceptions of what it feels 
exists ; and therefore they are necessary truths : 
because the feeling is always the same, the 
idea involved in it is unchangeable — the 
stream cannot rise above the fountain. 

Our intuitive belief in substance, or the re- 
ality of things, affords a fair illustration of the 
relation between our first feelings and our first 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION. 127 

ideas. The assurance that we have to do with 
realities, not merely with j)henoinena, is certain- 
ly one of the earliest, latest, most persistent 
of our human faiths. But it is the direct men-, 
tal outcome of our feeling of existence. Be- 
fore the reasoning by which Descartes demon- 
strates personal existence, " I think, therefore 
I am," is the sense of existence ; and the belief 
m existence is not a logical, but a natural out- 
growth of the feeling ; a process, not of logic, 
but of life ; a conclusion, therefore, which car- 
ries in it the certainty of nature. It is imme- 
diate knowledge — that is, knowledge coming, 
without any intervening logical processes, di- 
rectly to the mind through its sense-perception 
of its own real being. And if the mind that 
thinks is real, then there is reality in the world ; 
all appearances are the modes of existence of re- 
alities. Our feeling of real personal existence 
renders scepticism only an amusement of the 
philosophers — a play of thought at hide-and- 
seek with the world. The very doubt is put on 
by a being who knows that he is, and hence per- 
ceives himself to be a doubter. We cannot rid 
ourselves of the feeling that we are realities, 
having to do, therefore, with realities. Prac-~ 
tically, this universe never was to man a hollow 
sphere. The " I " stands in the centre of every 
man's world as a felt reality, and therefore the 
world of which he is the centre is not a shadow. 



128 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

No man, except when thinking about it, can be 
an idealist ; every man in his living is a realist. 
After this manner, then, through certain intui- 
tions, or first faiths, the feeling of ourselves 
as dependent existences manifests itself in a 
uniform manner, as invariable as the order of 
nature. 

If, then, the sense of absolute dependence 
involves perception — and intuitions, like that 
of cause, of the unconditioned, and the infinite, 
are the immediate perceptions growing out of 
it — it follows that our knowledge gained 
through these ideas is real knowledge. Through 
our spiritual feelings we touch the reality of 
things. Through them the Father of Spirits, 
who is nigh unto every one of us, is made known 
to our spirits. We feel after him, to use the 
happy phrase of the Apostle to the Gentiles, if 
haply we may find him ; as the world, through 
the eye, is brought into the mind, so the Unseen 
Spirit, through the sense of dependence, is re- 
vealed to the spirit that is in man. Both revela- 
tions, that of the seen and of the unseen, are 
inadequate ; but each in its measure is real. 
We have a truthful, though inadequate knowl- 
edge of the realities lying in close contact with 
both sides of our two-fold life, the earthly and 
the heavenly. We cannot, indeed, comprehend 
the infinite ; neither can we the finite. Only 
Omniscience can encircle omniscience. Our 



SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION. 1 29 

knowledge is but in part, whatever the sub- 
ject may be — an atom, or God. But the limita- 
tions of knowledge do not invalidate its reality, 
whatever the subject known — light, or the 
Father of Lights. A single ray let in through 
a dark chamber is enough to teach the nature 
of light. The eye need not take in the univer- 
sal sunshine to learn truly what light is in its 
nature, and everywhere. Shall more be re- 
quired of theology than of science ? May we 
not know, in like manner, what God is, though 
we know but in part ? May we not learn the 
nature of Infinite Love from a single beam in 
the darkness ? Science and theology in these 
respects have equal claims as real knowledge ; 
and our theology rests on a basis of spiritual 
sensation, or feeling, as valid as the bodily 
sensations upon which science builds its con- 
clusions. The supersensible world, the unseen 
and eternal, is near, and by its corresponding 
feeling of the soul borne in upon our thoughts ; 
as the material world, the things which are 
seen and transient are impressed through their 
corresponding organs upon the mind. In the 
one case, as in the other, we are affected by 
something without us ; for, as already shown, 
we do not ourselves produce the state of con- 
sciousness in which we find ourselves existing. 
We may enhance it, or diminish it ; we may 
call it to mind, or banish it from thought; 
6* 



130 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

this limited power we have over it, and this 
limited power only ; for it is not our own feel- 
ing, but our feeling of another and greater 
presence. As we did not at first create it, we 
cannot destroy it. It is inseparable from our 
existence. It is not, therefore, a mere subject- 
ive feeling, or affection of ourselves by our- 
selves. We are moved from without and from 
above. It is the finger of God ; for we feel 
the touch of something not ourselves, nor our 
friends, nor anything that is seen. We think 
of it, try to conceive what it is like; we must 
find a word for it, though it be nameless, and 
we speak to one another, and 'say : Our Crea- 
tor, our God, our Father in Heaven. 

In the view just advanced of the develop- 
ment of the concept of God from our religious 
feeling, we have not yet referred to the moral 
consciousness. The question meets us, there- 
fore, whether the sense of moral obligation, in 
like manner, springs from the immediate im- 
pression upon the soul of moral reality, and 
whether, then, we are brought by it into con- 
tact with a being who is the Good, the Perfect 
One—God ? 

This is not, it must be admitted, the view 
generally taken even by those who honor con- 
science as the linage of God in the soul. It is 
said the moral sense is a feeling of obligation 
to a law. It involves the perception, accord- 



MORAL PERCEPTION. 13 1 

ingly, of right as a law of life. This law, 
which is apprehended through the moral sense, 
has been defined in a great variety of ways. 
It is thought, by different moralists, to consist 
in the fitness of things, or our personal worth, 
or the highest reason, or the love of being in 
general, or disinterested benevolence ; or the 
idea of right is regarded as an ultimate idea — 
right because it is right. But moral theories, 
such as these, are so many amplifications of the 
moral idea, and so, each in its measure, all are 
true ; but none of them are explanations of the 
idea of duty, which is incapable of analysis 
into anything simpler than itself. In view of 
these many, oft-repeated, yet always fruitless 
attempts to define the nature of virtue, it would 
be a hopeless task to propound any new theory 
of it. But we are somewhat indebted to the 
researches of the physicists for the opening of 
an inquiry in which progress may be made in 
one direction, at least, by moral philosophy. 
Their endeavors to trace the genealogy of ex- 
isting things are teaching us to employ similar 
methods in morals and theology, and to search 
out the origin of our beliefs, or the manner of 
their appearance, in consciousness. From re- 
peated failures, then, to analyze the simple 
idea of duty into anything simpler, we turn 
more hopefully to search for the pure spring 
of the moral motive in the human heart. 



132 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

Whence does this fountain of life well up with- 
in us ? How does the idea of duty come into 
our minds ? Evidently the conscience cannot 
spring from the idea of law, for it leads to the 
conception of a law of right; and the same 
idea cannot be both parent and child of itself. 
The feeling of obligation cannot be the feeling 
produced by any process of moral reflection, 
for all moral ideas refer to the feeling of obli- 
gation for their own authority. We have 
shown, moreover, that the moral sense cannot 
be derived from any non-moral source, as the 
experience of utility or the social instinct. 
From what, then does it come ? From what 
does our sense of an external world come but 
from the reality of the world which we feel 
exists ? From what can the moral sense come 
but from the reality of moral being impressing 
its goodness upon the soul ? In us is the mor- 
al feeling ; without us, goodness — God. The 
one is the ever-present cause of the other ; no 
explanation is simpler, — is any more true to 
the facts of consciousness, or more profound? 
Moral truth, moral perfection — -existing, not as 
an abstraction of thought, but in the reality of 
a perfect nature, the very being and essence of 
God, is at the source of our feeling that we 
are moral beings and ought to do right. The 
Scripture hints at the origin of our whole mor- 
al consciousness when it says : We loved him 



MORAL PERCEPTION. 1 33 

because lie first loved us. Or, if we adopt the 
most approved reading, We love, because he 
first loved us. Our moral consciousness is the 
reflection of His. Our power to love is a ray 
from the Love which was before us. Our 
human hearts are His likeness. In short, be- 
cause God is before us as a Moral Reality — 
Love, therefore we are moral beings — we love. 
We feel and judge ourselves to be not a law to 
ourselves, but under obligation to something 
without ourselves — something impressing itself 
as right and good upon us ; and that something 
is not the reflection of our own thoughts ; it 
is before reason, and remains the same in spite 
of all attempts to reason it away ; it is real, 
the reality of goodness; it is God making 
Himself felt by beings made in his image. 
He is love : his very nature is the good, in ex- 
pressing which his will is holy, just and true. 
In him Kant's idea of the autonomy of the will 
is no dream, for he is a law unto himself. As 
all existence runs back into a Divine will, as all 
truths rest ultimately upon a Divine reason, 
so moral distinctions have their immutability 
in a Divine nature, in which there is light, and 
no darkness at all. He is love, and his will 
is the self-expression of his moral being ; law 
and grace the manifestation of his glory,* 



* Hegel's profound dictum, What is reasonable is real, and 
what is real is reasonable (Encyclopadie, § 6), needs to be supple- 



134 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

The moral sense, therefore, in accordance 
with the preceding reasoning, I regard as 
primarily the feeling of our relationship to 
the One perfect Being. The moral sense is 
our immediate feeling of the One who is good 
— that is God, Conscience, as a sense of the 
right, is the direct impression of the Father's 
perfectness upon the heart. Conscience, as a 
law of duty, is the perception of the right 
given in our immediate feeling of the God in 
whom we have our being. The moral law 
fully developed is : " Be ye therefore perfect, 
even as your Father which is in Heaven is 
perfect." Against this assertion that the 
moral nature of God, directly impressing it- 
self as the law of our being upon the soul, is 
the cause why we are morally affected, or feel 
ourselves to be moral beings, it may possi- 
bly be suggested, as an objection, that our 
first distinct moral idea is the conception of 
an end to be pursued by us, of something 
which we must be or become, and not the idea 
of God. But, if we admit this to be the case, 
this conception of a moral end, our moral 
ideal, involves implicitly the idea of One who 
has impressed that end upon us and who is 



merited on the moral side to be a whole truth. What is moral is 
real, and what is real is moral. The reasonable and the moral are, 
that is to say, our last, highest conception of real being. Is not 
this the truth underlying much of Prof. Dorner's best writing? 



MORAL PERCEPTION. 1 35 

our perfect Ideal. I do not necessarily hold, 
in what has been said above, that the moral 
feeling yields at once the clear, fully formed 
conception of God, but that the feeling itself 
is an immediate affection of the soul by the 
moral Reality above us, a sense of self as a 
moral being, which comes in, and through, our 
direct relationship to the Perfect One, and 
which could originate in no other way ; that 
this moral feeling involves therefore some per- 
ception, however vague, of the Godhead ; and 
that, consequently, in the developed moral 
consciousness of man, among its worked-out 
ideas, there must be found, as there always is 
found, the conception of God, either as Law- 
giver, Judge, or Ideal of our own being.* 

* Prof. Ulrici, whose discussions of the problems of natural 
theology have hardly received, as yet, the attention which their 
general reasonableness deserves, presents views of the moral feel- 
ing in substantial, though not entire, agreement with the above. 
11 It is clear," he says ( u Gottund der Mensch," 1, 2, p. 448), " that 
the moral feeling stands in original unity with the religious, and 
is of one and the same origin. " Again (Ibid. , p. 450), ; ' the religious 
and the moral feeling, the subjective grounds of religion and 
morality, are indeed not absolutely identical, but both belong 
together as immediately and inseparably as the metaphysical and 
the ethical being (Wesenheit) of God. He holds, further, that 
both these feelings involve perception ; the former immediately, 
but the latter mediately (implicitly) in the perception of the de- 
termination of man's own end through God (pp. 422, 449). 
Our only difference, here, would be that the latter feeling-per- 
ception is really as immediate a sense of the divine, as is the 
former ; for, from both, the idea of God springs up without the 
aid of inferences drawn from other sources of knowledge; as 
Ulrici himself insists that the idea of God is involved implicity in 



136 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

A few considerations may serve to bring 
out this view more distinctly into the light of 
that consciousness of good and evil in which 
all moral reasonings must be searched and 
tried. It is supported by the analogy of our 
perception of right or wrong character in our 
fellow-men. We speak as though good and 
evil were not abstractions, but real qualities 
in men. The moral quality is, in our common 
judgment, the essence of the man. We do not 
say, he has goodness, as he has brains, or 
sense, but he is good. Moral qualities, that 
is, are not the mere properties or accidents of 
a man, but they are of his very substance, and 
personality, the very spirit of a man ; and we 
perceive them in our friends to be the quali- 
ties by which they are what they are. In 
like manner, the ultimate moral perception is 
an intuition of the real nature or essential 
being of God. We then abstract the quality 
from the substance, and form the notion of 
law, righteousness, and the several moral attri- 
butes. These attributes, however, are but the 
mind's attempted definition of the real moral 
being, which is one and indivisible, the 
Divine nature, whose worthiest name is — Love. 



the moral feeling-perception, and is not mediated by reasonings 
from nature. Why, then, should we hesitate to say that the 
moral feeling is the immediate sense of our relationship to the 
Good, i. e. , God ? 



MORAL PERCEPTION. 1 37 

This origin of the moral idea will be found, 
also, to be in harmony with all subsequent 
moral experience ; and from it not a part only, 
but the whole moral consciousness, with all its 
distinctive effects, may be seen to proceed. It 
is, therefore, a rational account of conscience. 
First in order is the real goodness, God ; then, 
the feeling of that goodness in beings organ- 
ized for a moral consciousness and a moral his- 
tory ; then, the idea of the good, the concep- 
tion of law'j and a Lawgiver, more or less 
crude, or clarified, according to the general in- 
tellectual development of men ; and then, the 
reasoning upon and by means of these ideas, 
or ethics, and theology. This is the order of 
nature as we experience it ; this is the order of 
history, so far as we can trace it, in which the 
moral consciousness of man has been devel- 
oped. And when we consider the persist- 
ence and power of the moral sense in human 
consciousness, when we survey the successive 
works of the moral idea in history — the revo- 
lutions it has wrought ; the obstacles it has 
swept before it ; the advances it has made ; its 
mighty movements, shaking thrones, overturn- 
ing kingdoms, working beneath the will of 
nations, and beyond the foresight of man ; — ■ 
if, in short, we measure the power by the con- 
sequences, the cause by the effect, only one 
explanation of the moral motive force is suffi- 



I38 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

cient for the work done ; it is the power of 
God manifesting itself in tlie hearts of men, 
and revealing itself as the Divine order of 
human history. In the individual soul the 
Moral Reality, at the source of all its moral 
feelings, is the constant cause of its moral life; 
it is the stream, never failing, which keeps in 
motion the moral powers of the soul ; and 
these, without its influence ever flowing by, 
could never produce the good works which 
are wrought on the earth. Our moral faculties 
would be but as wheels without the moving 
power, were it not for the influence of the 
Holy Spirit. God, as the moral motive power, 
is necessary to a sufficient explanation of the 
moral life of a soul. And what is written 
in small characters in the individual life is 
written largely in history. God is the only 
rational explanation of its moral order. God 
as the moral motive power of human history 
is necessary to a sufficient explanation of its 
beginning, progress, and destiny. 

This conclusion is not a mere deduction 
from observed facts. We do not simply infer 
from the motion that there must have been a 
cause; rather in the motion, which we feel, 
we also have the working of the motive force. 
The power in the result is a fact of present 
experience. God in the moral life and his- 
tory of the world is a present and ever-living 



MORAL PERCEPTION. 139 

power. In and through our moral experience 
we actually have working in us that which is 
good, the influence of the Spirit of God ; as 
the plant, in its growth, has the sun. The 
light is in the color of the leaf, the warmth in 
the ripeness of the fruit. Were blossoms or 
fruit to become conscious, they would have, 
at least, some feeling of the dwelling in them 
of the sunshine. We who are self-conscious 
do feel the presence of the good above us in 
the growth of the good within us. We feel 
it more and more, the better men and women 
we become. As the fruit is not only of the 
earth, but also of the sky, — both soil and sun- 
shine transformed in it and made a new crea- 
tion; so are we not only of the earth, earthy, 
but also of heaven, heavenly ; in our best, 
ripest, sweetest selves treasuring up influences 
from above. 



CHAPTER V. 

OBJECTIONS. VERIFICATION. CONCLUSION. 

Before proceeding directly to the verifica- 
tion of the conclusion now reached, we must 
clear the subject of certain misconceptions to 
which it is exposed, and free our reasoning of 
objections which consequently may be brought 
against it. 

The objection lies upon the surface of our 
reasoning — but only upon the surface — that 
the feelings which we have regarded as the ori- 
ginating impulses of all our thinking are them- 
selves the results, also, of thinking. It is un- 
deniably true that knowledge ends, as well as 
begins, in feeling. From feeling through ideas 
to feeling, is the common course of our intel- 
lectual life. You feel the beauty of a land- 
scape, or a picture ; you discover the features 
which produced that feeling, and you come 
away with an enhanced sense of the beautiful. 
Feeling is both before and after knowledge, 
and all knowledge serves to enrich feeling. 
So it is of our sense of goodness and of 
God. The knowledge of Grod ends in senti- 



OB JECTIONS.— THE SPIRITUAL FA CUL TV. 1 4 1 

ments more exalted than the feelings from 
which it springs. The last effort of thought, 
the highest possible state of mind, is worship. 

But from our power to purify and to enrich 
our moral and religious feelings through a 
thoughtful, worshipful life, it does not follow 
that they are simply, or entirely, the results of 
our thoughts; on the other hand we only cul- 
tivate what already exists to be improved ; we 
put to life's exchangers the talents already giv- 
en us as our personal capital. This objection 
would lie against our reasoning, therefore, only 
in so far as it could be shown that any feeling 
regarded as original has been obvjously de- 
rived from other elements of experience. 

Again, it may be alleged that the mind 
possesses no special sense for goodness, or for 
God, as it is fitted out, through the body, 
with special senses for apprehending external 
things. But, in the view above taken, con- 
science is not regarded as a special sense, but 
as that general feeling of an eternal right, 
or goodness, which, like the feeling of exist- 
ence, comes to us, not through a particular fac- 
ulty, but in and through our very being what 
we are. The endeavor of Bishop Butler to map 
out man's nature into certain original faculties, 
or native principles of conduct, of which con- 
science is one, and the supreme one, may be a 
true description of man, as good Bishop Butler 



142 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

observed him in the eighteenth century ; but 
no map of our faculties does justice either to 
the real unity of our spiritual nature, or to the 
historical development of our powers. The 
view here outlined escapes, however, the ob- 
jection which Mr. Arnold has urged against 
Bishop Butler's famous " Sermons on Human 
Nature.* " The effort to live," which Mr. Arn- 
old regards as our first instinct, the first awak- 
ening sense and struggle for human existence, 
contains the feelings out of which both mo- 
rality and religion shall surely grow. We do 
not conjure into existence, for the purposes of 
our argument, a spiritual faculty. By the 
spirit we mean ourselves, or the side of our- 
selves turned towards Divine things ; ourselves 
in our higher life ; ourselves in our capacity to 
receive influences that do not come from the 
things that are seen ; ourselves under the im- 
pression of, and moved by, supersensible powers. 
The whole man, in the entirety of his being, is 
the organ of spiritual, as he is, also, of earthly 
feelings and experiences. We stand facing 
two worlds, — often vibrating and trembling 
between the attractions of two worlds, — the 
seen and the unseen. More than this, we are in 
two kingdoms at the same time. The sky is 
not merely above us, Prof. Tyndall informs 



* Articles in Contemporary Review, Feb., March, 1876. 



OBJECTIONS.— DIVINE ACTION 1 43 

us, but we are also in tlie sky ; so the kingdom 
of heaven is not merely above us, but- we are 
in it, and swayed by its influences, at the same 
time that we walk the earth and feel its 
gravitation. Man is himself, as the fathers 
used to say, organized for God. The religious 
feeling is the general sense of God, and his 
righteousness, which we have because we are 
organized for it, and by birthright are of the 
kingdom of heaven. 

The validity of this feeling-perception of 
the larger reality in which we have our being, 
is not touched by any difficulty, which we may 
find, in conceiving the mode of the Divine 
action upon us of which we become conscious. 
Again we must remember the warning of 
science to make sparing use of the word im- 
possible. It is said that this earth, a mere 
point in space, receives into its fertile soil in- 
fluences from the whole expanse of the heavens, 
that into these mortal bodies is taken up not 
merely the dust of the earth, but the dust of 
which the stars are made ; so that an arm of 
flesh, in its bone, and tissues, and blood, may 
possess, organized for our use, particles of 
matter that have drifted earthward from all 
outlying space ; — but while our science thus 
asserts our kinship through our very bodies 
with distant worlds and the whole created 
universe, nevertheless, shall we deny in the 



144 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING, 

same breath the relationship of our spirits to 
all spirits and to the Father of all ? Shall 
we say, in our little faith, that while the far- 
off star can send its messengers of light to the 
eye, or this earth feel to its centre attractions 
from remotest space, He who is the spirit of 
the whole alone is a distant presence, incom- 
municable, having no influence over us, with- 
out way of approach to a human soul ? All 
comparisons of Divine with natural things are 
unworthy, and but in part ; I cannot, however, 
help thinking that what the invisible ether 
pervading all space, and taking up into itself 
and carrying on, by its own invisible vibra- 
tions, the influences of all worlds, is to the 
stars — their medium of mutual attractions and 
light, — such is the Spirit of the Infinite God to 
his moral creation ; the invisible Omnipresence 
who receives and perpetuates all spiritual 
motions and attractions in his own ceaseless 
activity ; through whom the thought, centuries 
ago, of illumined prophet becomes to-day light 
in my soul ; by whom the prayers sent forth, 
pulsating and aglow from parental hearts, are 
taken quickly up, and suffered to descend in 
life-giving influence upon some far-off boy ; the 
Divine medium of communication for all times, 
and between saints on earth and the multi- 
tude of the Heavenly hosts ; — even that one 
and the self -same Spirit from whose presence, 



OBJECTIONS.— DIVINE ACTION. 1 45 

though we dwell in the uttermost parts of the 
sea, we cannot escape ; and who, from his ful- 
ness of all grace, divideth to every man sever- 
ally as He will. 

But better than any analogies from the 
occult working of natural forces, are the hints 
to be derived from personal influence as to the 
possible modes of the affection of the soul by 
God. Personal sympathies and antipathies 
indicate certainly very subtle modes of action 
of mind upon mind. The senses are the 
bearers of this magnetism from person to per- 
son, but they are only the means of convey- 
ance, not the magnetism; the wires, not the 
electric current. And sometimes it seems as 
if the influence was almost independent of the 
wires, leaping directly from mind to mind, 
from heart to heart. There are experiences 
not fully explained by our science, during 
which the senses seem to be asleep, or passive, 
while mind reads mind. While in view of 
these more mysterious intercommunications of 
thought, as well as in view of the more famil- 
iar instances of personal magnetism, and of 
the vague sense of personal presence — as when 
we look up to catch another's eye upon us, or 
turn to find some one approaching us — we are 
hardly justified in asserting that the physical 
means of relationship, the bands of sense, are 
ever broken or dispensed with ; they certainly 
7 



146 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

at times do seem to be very fine and obscure, 
too delicate for detection — mere films, or gossa- 
mer threads, . as .it were, scarce visible even 
when we search for them in the strongest 
light which experience can throw upon them : 
so that, it may be said, the soul by virtue of 
its own unseen essence seems to strive after 
immediate personal communion, and in rela- 
tion to other embodied souls seems, at times, 
almost capable of breaking loose from the 
coarse bonds of sense, and seeing other souls, 
as it were, face to face. Such experiences, 
not unfamiliar, though never perfectly under- 
stood, suggest, at least, the conception of 
possible modes of relationship between the 
Spirit of God, and the spirit which is in man ; 
an influence of the Divine over the human too 
immediate to be caught aud subjected to any 
chemical analysis ; the felt magnetism of the 
Unseen Presence over the human heart. All 
at least that can be required, at this point of 
our reasoning, is to show that the supposed 
action of the God without upon the godlike 
within us, is not unthinkable, or inconceiv- 
able. There may be then, we say, between 
Him and ourselves, an influence hardly de- 
pendent upon eye or ear, a direct impression 
of His being upon ours ; and this impression is 
actually received by us, and recognized, in a 
sense of wonder, of awe, of humility, yet of 



OBJECTIONS.— DIVINE ACTION. 147 

strange elevation of soul above all outward 
things — the feeling of immortal being, and 
kinship with the Eternal ! 

But, even if it be urged that,. as we are now 
constituted, there must be always in personal 
influence some thread of sensible communica- 
tion, and that we have, accordingly, no war- 
rant in experience for supposing a direct in- 
ward action of the Spirit of God upon our 
spirits — and it would be a bold generalization 
to shut out such possibilities of spiritual in- 
fluence — but granting this premise, it remains 
still perfectly conceivable that, through God's 
manifold works, material avenues for the com- 
ing and going of Divine influences to the soul 
may have been prepared from the creation of 
the world ; and, in this case, we should still 
have, not merely our own conclusions, or 
reasonings toward God from his works, but 
through these we should receive directly the 
inflowing influence of the Creator upon his 
creatures ; — his works may be not merely dead 
memorials of his activity, proofs to the reason 
that once there has been a God, but also living 
means of God's present self-revelations, the 
channels, as it were, of the incoming of God's 
presence and power to human hearts* Do we 
not recall many a landscape which has sug- 
gested more than the beauty pictured in the 
eye? Have we not more than once looked 



148 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

upon phases of nature so fall, to the mind's in- 
sight, of a Divine thought, that at the moment 
we should hardly have been surprised, if we 
had seen visions of the Highest \ Have we 
not, among the mountains, had new meanings 
of the old word, worship, borne in upon us ? 
Of whom have we found ourselves thinking, 
when we felt the spirit of the place ? Nature 
is wonderfully suggestive of God. Our best 
poetry witnesses to our sense of a Divine 
revelation through nature. But imagination 
Rusldn rightly defines as the power of seeing 
things as they are. Poetry is not the con- 
jurer of idle -shapes, but the diviner of the 
secrets of nature, and the human soul. Any 
philosophy of either which has no ear for the 
poetry of the ages — the poetry, that is, not of 
yesterday, or of to-day, but of all time — is in 
danger of missing both the hidden wisdom of 
the creation, and the secrets of the human 
heart. I should not dare to assert, as the 
truth of things, any generalizations within 
which no place should be provided for the 
lessons of the poets. 

But the objection is at hand, that all men 
do not betray a poet's sensitiveness to the soul 
of nature. But this view of the origin of our 
religious ideas at once admits of, and accounts 
for, the greatest diversities in the religious con- 
sciousness of men. This objection, which 



OBJECTIONS.— RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES. 1 49 

might prove fatal to the supposition of a spe- 
cific religious faculty, does not even touch the 
theory that man is organized for a higher life 
than that which appears, and is capable of re- 
ceiving impressions of Divine realities which 
may be developed, repeated; and intensified, 
or neglected, disobeyed, and seemingly lost 
from all his thoughts. In addition to w r hat 
has already been remarked upon the fact that 
races without formed religious ideas may possi- 
bly be discovered, but that no tribe incapa- 
pable of religious quickening and growth has 
been found, it is here only necessary to call 
attention to a few observations which turn this 
objection rather into an evidence in favor of 
our reasoning. Thus it is noticeable that the 
development of the religious nature corre- 
sponds with the general forwardness and intel- 
lectual growth of different tribes and individ- 
uals. In savage tribes the religious conscious- 
ness is usually found to be quite in harmony 
with its surroundings.* But in the struggle of 
ideas for existence, the purer idea of God sur- 
vives. The religious consciousness is not oat- 
grown, but persists ; and the fact that it sur- 
vives, shows that it is fit to survive. Supersti- 



*Peschel, " Races," p., 261. Lubbock ("Origin of Civilization," 
p. 115) says races, in a similar stage of mental development, 
however distinct their origin may be, and however distant the 
regions they inhabit, have very similar religious conceptions. 



150 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

tions decay, but religion survives. Every tribe 
emerging from barbarism, appears in history 
with its altars, and its gods. The saying of 
Plutarch is strictly true — You cannot find a 
city without a temple. Possibly travellers 
may find some nomadic tribe without fire, 
without houses, and without its God. But no 
one thinks of finding a city, a civilized peo- 
ple, without temples, and religious faiths. 
To-day the most cultivated nations are not the 
most irreligious. The rapid succession of re- 
ligious controversies in modern history betrays 
the persistent and growing power with which 
religion impresses its truths upon the advanc- 
ing intelligence of the world. Theology be- 
comes less and less important, the lower down 
in the scale of civilization one descends. The 
religious question is pre-eminently the question 
of the most educated people in the most ad- 
vanced times. Every book about religion, 
whether it be a book of questioning, or of faith, 
witnesses to the hold which supernal powers 
actually have upon man's thought. Every 
thoughtful mind instinctively falls to discuss- 
ing the problems of theology. 

We observe, again, among men, great differ- 
ences in the distinctness and power of their 
religious beliefs, even though they may confess 
the same faith. This fact, also, is in favorable 
consistency with the view here advanced. 



OBJECTIONS.— RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES. 151 

There seem to be differences of sensitiveness 
to the unseen, in the constitutional tempera- 
ment of men, just as there are differences of 
sensibility to colors and forms. Some persons 
are more naturally religious than others. 
There are organizations naturally selected to 
be prophets and priests of the Holy Ghost. 
Perhaps by influences working down through 
a long line of inheritance, they are prepared 
to feel the inspiration of the Spirit of God. 
They are ready, when a voice from above calls, 
to answer : " Here am I." Perhaps there may 
be more meaning than commentators know in 
the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the 
son of David, the son of Abraham. Through 
the law of inheritance, working toward finer 
spiritual endowments, there has been kept, in 
not a few choice lives, the covenant from the 
fathers to the children's children. 

There are manifest, also, among us great 
differences in the natural power to bring out 
in thought what comes to us through the re- 
ligious sense. The power of insight, or divin- 
ation, and the ability to form theological con- 
ceptions, are two distinct powers not always in 
direct ratio to each other. Some men are by 
nature dogmatists. Feelings crystallize in 
them at once into clear-cut ideas. They can 
hold no opinion long in solution. They are im- 
patient of the indefinite. They can hardly wait 



152 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

for their faiths slowly to settle themselves. 
Others are by nature mystics, feeling more 
than they can express, and seeing farther than 
their understanding can follow with its meas- 
uring-line. The one class are the system-build- 
ers, the dogmatic carpenters of truth ; and their 
service is to build the creeds of the church, — 
faith's dwelling-places, which, however, every 
generation may need to build over again, as it 
needs to remodel its houses. The others are 
faith's prophets — the men who have visions un- 
utterable, the men who write faith's scriptures. 
The vividness and certainty of faith, more- 
over, is directly related to the purity and 
earnestness of the whole life. Nothing is 
more certain than the tendency of wrong do- 
ing to deaden the sensitiveness of the heart to 
truth. A single impatient thought, one angry 
feeling, may jostle and throw, as it were, out 
of focus the powers of spiritual perception, 
more delicate by far as they are than the ex- 
quisitely adjusted lenses of the eye, and more 
sensitive to injury than the quick nerve of 
sight. Sin is a moral cataract. There are 
those who having eyes sees not. The pure in 
heart shall see God. Any impurity is as a 
cloud between the soul and God. A gust of 
passion. ruffles the soul, and breaks up the re- 
flection of those supernal glories which mirror 
themselves, as stars in the calm lake, in the 



OBJECTIONS.— RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES. 1 53 

pure in heart. We may by a contentious 
spirit put ourselves farther from God than we 
can by all our studies draw near to Him. 
Not miles, but sins measure the soul's distance 
from God ; and not pilgrimages, but penitent 
prayers, bring it near the kingdom of Heaven. 
This too familiar power of sin, therefore, to 
dull the feeling of Divine things, and to ob- 
scure religious knowledge, is a sufficient 
answer to any objections to our reasoning to 
be drawn from the apparent absence in many 
of anything like a religious nature. For even 
when that nature suffers no violence from 
immoral conduct, it can be greatly impaired 
by neglect, or rendered rudimentary by per- 
sistent and inherited disuse. Absorbing exer- 
cise in other pursuits may leave the mind 
empty of religious convictions, and well nigh 
impotent to gain them. A specialist may sink 
his shaft so deeply into a particular mine of 
investigation as to be able at last to look up 
and see above him hardly a bit of the broad 
sky. Specialists in science, like miners, dis- 
cover, indeed, much precious ore; but they 
need frequently to leave their shafts, and to 
dwell in the light of common day, to see 
things in general as men should look upon 
them. The eye kept daily at the microscope 
may be in danger of losing something of 
nature's larger meanings. How quickly, and 
7* 



154 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

how surely, any power, and especially, there- 
fore, our finest and best powers, may be ren- 
dered impotent through abuse, or even by dis- 
use, is one of the truisms of education. The 
power of man to feel the touch of the finger 
of God, is no exception to the general law of 
culture. Final inability to believe in any- 
thing worth believing may sometimes be pre- 
dicted from the observed habits and lives of 
men naturally capable of better things. The 
stimulus of some extraordinary religious ex- 
citement sometimes recalls in such the relig- 
ious faculties to life, as paralyzed nerves have 
been known to quiver under powerful galvanic 
currents. Atheists under strong excitement 
of danger, or of great duties, have become be- 
lievers ; but it does seem possible, neverthe- 
less, for the religious nature of man to become 
in this world, under the most powerful mo- 
tives of a moral life known to us, an incurable 
paralytic. Our souls have fearful power of 
moral suicide. But no number of cases of 
partial or complete religious paralysis can 
prove that man is by nature a religious imbe- 
cile, One living man would be enough to 
prove that life is a possibility, a whole ceme- 
tery of dead bones to the contrary. Jesus 
Christ is enough to prove that man can live 
by the word of God, though the whole world 
lies dead in sin. 



OBJECTIONS.— INNATE IDEAS. 1 55 

The view here developed, it should be dis- 
tinctly noticed, is not exposed to the objections 
whifih are to be urged against the theory of in- 
nate ideas. God is not revealed to the soul by 
the bringing out of an idea of Him stamped 
upon its very make, as though the mind were 
a parchment, written all over by the finger of 
the Creator, and needing only the light of 
experience in which to disclose its meanings. 
Every mechanical conception of human nature 
is disappearing from modern thought. If 
Darwinism shall accomplish nothing else, it 
has banished the idea of a supernatural me- 
chanics from the minds of those who are 
searching the problems of life. Our mental 
and theological science is discarding to-day any 
carpenter-theory of creation, providence, educa- 
tion, or regeneration. The best, divinest things 
are never made ; they grow. It is one chief 
argument in favor of this view of man's relig- 
ious nature, that it is most clearly expressed 
in these dynamical modes of thought which 
have superseded, or are fast superseding, me- 
chanical modes of explaining men and things. 
For, the idea of God, and indeed all religious 
conceptions, we hold to be the resultants ol 
certain persistent forces at work from the be- 
ginning, as we see them operative now, and 
which we can best name by the Scriptural 
phrases, the Spirit of God, and the spirit which 



156 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

is in man. Faith in God and supersensible real- 
ities is first a natural and necessary develop- 
ment of these religious powers, and then logical- 
ly a result of thinking. Before all reasoning, 
faith exists in the impulse and direction of the 
spirit to search along all paths for the foot- 
steps of its Master and Lord. 

One thought more must be added before our 
reasoning wall be a completed circle. Can the 
deliverances of the religious feeling be verified ? 
Men and women have been led into the wildest 
vagaries by following mere feeling as though it 
were a revelation from heaven. There are com- 
mon-sense principles of conduct, and rational 
tests of truth ; and they who ignore them, expe- 
rience proves by grievous examples, are danger- 
ous visionaries. How then will the ideas which 
you claim are derived immediately, and in a 
uniform way, from the religious feeling, stand 
the examination of the court of common-sense ? 
How will these ideas comport themselves un- 
der the rational tests of the genuine and true ? 

At this point the distinction between the 
grounds of belief and the tests of belief should 
be clearly seen. Thus, a witness testifies, and 
is cross-examined. The ground of belief in him 
is not the process of cross-examination, nor the 
laws of evidence by which his testimony is 
searched, but the steadfastness of the witness 
himself under the lawyer's fire. Ultimately 



VERIFICATION.— TESTS OF BELIEF. 1 57 

the witness is his own evidence. The logical 
tests of truth, in other words, only exclude 
possibilities of falsehood ; truth is its own 
evidence. You see an object, and apply all 
the means known to you to try the correctness 
of your perception. You look at it again and 
again, from different points, and in different 
lights. You finally believe that your percep- 
tion is correct, because you see what you do 
see, and you can find no reason for accusing 
the eye of deception. It is not the reasoning, 
but the seeing, which is the source of your 
knowledge, and the ultimate reason of your 
certainty. 

This distinction between sources of belief 
and of the assurance of belief, on the one 
hand, and the tests of belief, or means of bring- 
ing out into clear consciousness the certainty 
of belief, on the other hand, is a distinction 
most important to religious science; obvious 
as it is, it has been too often overlooked. 
Some writers, ignoring the ultimate ground of 
certainty in faith, lay upon the mere tests of 
truth a weight of conviction which they are 
unable to bear. This neglect of the sources of 
belief, and the habit of throwing the whole 
burden of faith upon the proofs of it, has been 
in our theology a prolific source of scepticism. 
God does not exist first at the end of our aroai- 
ments. He is in the very impulse and energy 



T58 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

of the soul which leads us to think of Him, and 
to gather evidence of his existence. He is to 
the human soul, as to the whole creation, the 
First and the Last, — the Omega, because he is 
the Alpha, of all our living and thinking. 
The means of verifying the idea of God can no 
more produce that idea than the chemist's acids 
can create the element in his crucible to be 
analyzed. The good woman who, after listen- 
ing to a labored discourse in proof of the exist- 
ence of God, told the preacher that she be- 
lieved in a God notwithstanding, was after all 
a better philosopher than the learned divine ; 
for her faith was a vital experience of God, 
It is time our theology were done with at- 
tempts to prove the existence of a God to be 
discovered by our processes of reasoning, as 
astronomers calculate the place where a dis- 
tant planet must be found. The Biblical the- 
ology is, " God is nigh unto every man." " That 
which may be known of God is manifest in 
them, for God hath showed it unto them. For 
the invisible things of him from the creation of 
the world, are clearly seen, being understood by 
the things that are made, even his eternal power 
and Godhead." The inner manifestation, 
then, is the source of faith, and the things 
which are made, are the tests of faith, by 
which what may be known of God is to be 
made clear in thought and verified. 



VERIFICATION.— TESTS OF BELIEF. 1 59 

Given, then, tlie source of f aitli in the imme- 
diate feeling of God, the logical understanding 
has next its work to perform ; and the relig- 
ious faith is complete only after it has passed 
through, unscathed, the processes of reasoning. 
One cannot by any possibility bring out of the 
logical mill food for the life of man unless the 
grain has first been put into the hopper. Hence 
it is that so many arguments, put together as 
though they could produce religious faith, are 
admirably constructed systems, every wheel 
and connecting belt in the right place, but, 
without the raw material of faith elsewhere 
gathered, they grind to no purpose. But 
the logical powers do have an indispensable 
service to perform in sifting and preparing 
for life's uses the materials of faith ; and not 
to subject our faith to the most approved pro- 
cesses of the reason, would be, in theology, like 
going back from the perfected methods of civi- 
lization to the rude means by which savages 
separate the chaff from the wheat, or sift the 
kernel from the hull of the corn. 

How, then, it remains for us to inquire, before 
our view of the religious consciousness is com- 
plete, do the tests which may be applied by 
the understanding affect the genuineness of 
the religious feeling, and the validity of the 
beliefs growing out of it ? Can any reasoning 
eradicate this upspringing religious faith from 



l6o THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

human nature, or even for any length of time 
arrest its growth ? Can reason dig beneath it, 
and uproot it ? Does it remain indestructible 
under the strongest tests of our logic ? Then 
it is self-proved. Then it is its own evidence. 
Then, reason, failing to conquer it, must sub- 
mit to its authority. 

The burden of proof is hereby thrown upon 
the case against the religious consciousness. If 
the reason cannot disprove it, it remains, like 
our consciousness of existence, like our sense 
of the external world, a rational faith. It 
must be shown that the religious feeling pro- 
duces ideas which violate the laws of thought ; 
that it contains self-contradictory elements, 
and is self -destructive ; or else it must be ac- 
cepted as a genuine source of knowledge. God 
must be proved not to exist; the concept of 
God must be shown to be an impossibility, a 
suicidal idea ; or we must believe in the testi- 
mony of the soul to his eternal power and God- 
head. But to bring this weight of proof 
against the other-world sense no philosophy 
worthy the name would venture to do. The 
very most that scepticism can make good is, 
that the Divine is beyond our mental reach, and 
incomprehensible ; that religious ideas carried 
out to their last consequence lead to bewilder- 
ment, and end in confusion. But so ideas of 
the most familiar things leave us in mystery 



VERIFICATION.— TESTS OF BELIEF. l6l 

and contradictions, if we follow them as far as 
thought can pursue them. Thus, the concep 
tion of the atoms of matter, and of force, upon 
which our positive science rests, involves 
thought in hopeless perplexities. Such diffi- 
culties, however, serve to show that w T e have 
reached the limits of our mental power of ap- 
prehension, not that our ideas are all null and 
void. The fact that we can form a growing, 
but never an adequate conception of God, 
proves simply our own finiteness; it by no 
means disproves the evidence of our souls that 
He is near us, though beyond our largest 
thought. 

But more than this should be said. The 
tests of faith not only, negatively,, exclude what 
is erroneous or merely phantasmal in our origi- 
nal feeling; but also, positively, they bring its 
contents out into the clear light. The faith 
of the soul in its God, in the focus of many 
converging lines of reasoning, is seen to be a 
genuine faith. It would carry us beyond our 
purpose to enumerate the various reasonings 
which find in this central faith of the soul 
in God their meeting point and reconciliation. 
One of the oldest arguments for the existence of 
a supreme Intelligence — that from design — 
seemed for a season, it is true, to be deserted, if 
not closed, by followers of Darwin, who found 
new ways of interpreting the evidences of 



1 62 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

adaptation in the creation. But there are not 
wanting signs that their diverging course is al- 
ready turning back into the old direction, 
toward the same meeting point of all paths 
of thought in the conclusion that there is a 
Creator and Lord of all. So far from evo- 
lution being necessarily atheistic, if we may 
judge from what Prof. Gray* has already ac- 
complished in his graceful reasonings, the theo- 
logian of another generation will be in a better 
condition to construct the argument from de- 
sign, out of materials to be gathered from the 
increasing store of biological knowledge, than 
Pal ey was in his day ; and the argument will be 
the more cogent, and conclusive, when it shall 
have been freed from the last vestiges of me- 
chanical contrivance. 

This view of a growing universe not yet 
finished, which is a conception that may be 
called the special contribution of modern 
science to theology, relieves, not a little, the 
difficulties in the argument from design. The 
seeming wastefulness of nature, for example, 
hardly seems consistent with a prudent design. 
The sun itself is a gigantic spendthrift. Solar 
resources enough are 'wasted in the vacant 
depths between the stars, to set up in house- 
keeping thousands of worlds like ours. Nat- 



; Darwiniana." 



ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN. 1 63 

ure seems also to have been immensely waste- 
ful of time. Millions of ages have been suffer- 
ed to run their course before history began. 
A whole stream flows on to turn at last a single 
wheel. And all through life, from the least 
things up to the greatest, this seeming prodi- 
gality of Providence runs. Moreover, the cross- 
purposes of nature, the architectural dispropor- 
tions and mal adjustments of things, the lines 
that cannot be made to meet, the unequal dis- 
tribution of the weights, the constructions for 
which there seems as yet to be no reason in nat- 
ure's workmanship, all offer perplexing ques- 
tions to the believer in one wise design. " I 
cannot believe that the good God of whom you 
tell me, made the world," said a Brahmin to 
the missionary, "because why are there left 
so many great rocks in the sea, upon which 
the ships go to pieces ? " The larger part of 
our difficulties with Providence resolve them- 
selves into the Hindoo's trouble with the rocks 
in the sea. The ocean is useful to float the ships, 
but in it are terrible rocks. The general sur- 
face and flow of things is admitted to be benefi- 
cent, but there are some bad reefs. Now 
these difficulties, and difficulties like these, in 
the argument from design, which have never 
been answered completely to the satisfaction of 
hesitating minds, by the proofs drawn from 
Paley's theory of a manufactured creation, are 



1 64 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

greatly relieved, at least, upon the hypothesis of 
creation by evolution. There is that scattereth, 
and yet increaseth. The seeming waste is for 
the more perfect growth. We must be slow 
to judge unfinished architecture. The creation 
is begun, — He build eth, saith the prophet, his 
stories in the heavens, — but the creation, in its 
higher forms and purposes, is not yet finished. 
The present visible system of things is but 
temporary ; it is spending its energies for the 
production of another more advanced order of 
things, and the sunbeams which seem lost in 
the ether, as well as other forces which appear 
now to run to waste, may have functions to 
fulfil of which we know nothing, and they are 
doubtless conserved in that " Unseen Uni- 
verse " which, according to one of the latest 
prophecies of our science, is to take the place 
of the heavens and the earth which are pass- 
ing away. And upon the supposition of evo- 
lution, the very imperfections and obstacles to 
be straggled against in the environment of life 
have their uses. Even the rocks may have 
their place in a design which looks toward the 
training of alert, brave men. Difficulties seem- 
ingly unaccountable, if we look at the world 
simply as a perfectly manf actured article, may 
be the right things rightly left in a world intend- 
ed for the training of a race of moral athletes. 
Is it not worth all the trials, all the farewells, 



CONCL USION.— FAITH REASONABLE. 1 6 5 

all the losses of time, to learn how to love for 
eternity? to gain a heart capable of loving 
forever ? 

The idea of God first given in the feeling 
of dependence, is found to be the simplest ex- 
planation of all our thinking. Itself underiv- 
ed from reasoning, it is the harmony of all 
our reasonings. This light thrown into our 
darkened understandings from above, itself a 
dazzling mystery, enables us to see plainly all 
things within our experience. Therefore is it 
real light and no dream. 

While therefore in the preceding pages we 
have sought for the origin of religion, and the 
manner of its coming forth in our conscious- 
ness, we find in conclusion that the faith which 
is thus born of the Father of Spirits within us, 
so far from being proved false in life, is the 
only true interpreter of life to us ; it is a faith 
which sums up in itself a vast number of ex- 
periences, and which is, therefore, stronger 
than any one argument for it, because it is both 
the beginning of all reasoning, and also the end 
of many reasonings. It is, so to speak, the re- 
sultant of life, the direction toward (rod and 
heaven, along which the human reason, under 
the varied influences impelling it, finally and 
persistently moves. 

A few words need to be added to indicate 
the relation of the position now gained toward 



1 66 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

further theological inquiries. It follows from 
the results before us that progress in theology 
may be made in purifying and enlarging the 
conception of God. For the feeling of God's 
being and nature is never fully taken up into 
any one conception of Him, and the religious 
feeling acts and reacts upon us in a twofold 
manner, both leading us constantly to think 
of God, and causing us to become soon dissat- 
isfied with our best thoughts of Him. Theol- 
ogy, therefore, must be a progressive science ; 
it can become stationary only as the original 
feeling of God is deadened. There has been 
in history a vast growth of man's ideas of 
God, or theology. The roots of a living faith 
are hidden in the depths of human nature ; but 
the fruits may improve with the years, and are 
made more perfect by cultivation. This idea 
theology will reject as unripe ; that, as cor- 
rupted : this conclusion it will regard as but a 
first fruit ; that, as the ripeness of its best 
growth. 

Animism, for example, the mere belief in 
spirits, is one of its earliest and crudest forms. 
Polytheism is a more advanced, but imperfect 
product ; monotheism, a higher fruit of the life 
of faith in the world. And our ideas of God 
have grown much within the century, and they 
still are ripening. Our theology is gaining a 
more thoroughly ethical conception of God, 



CONCLUSION.— PROGRESS IN THEOLOGY. 167 

and the creeds of the church, essentially the 
same as in the first centuries, are taking on a 
better color from the clearer moral light in 
which faith sees God. The view here unfold- 
ed of the origin of religious knowledge leads 
toward this more purely moral conception of 
God. For as we come to know God first 
through our personal consciousness, so it fol- 
lows naturally that we should increase in the 
knowledge of Him through those affections and 
relationships which go to make up our real 
personal life. Our thoughts toward God are 
thus led along analogies, and lines of inference, 
which carry us far above and beyond the 
merely governmental views which have largely 
obtained in theology. Jesus began to preach 
the kingdom of God. By that phrase of hal- 
lowed associations he might best express at first 
to his disciples his doctrine of the eternal life. 
But in his last discourses, when his disciples 
were better able to understand his meaning, 
he chooses the words of intimate personal re- 
lationship to express what God is to his own. 
No one of the Christian doctrines can receive 
its fullest and final expression in the language 
of covenant and altar. The most personal af- 
fections and relationships are the truest types 
for speech concerning God. Our familiar, 
earthward duties are the clearest reflections of 
our Heavenward obligations, and religion is 



1 68 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

morality toward God. Especially from the 
better apprehension of what love is in its 
threefoldness — the love which gives, or benev- 
olence ; the love which puts itself in anoth- 
er's place, or vicarious sympathy; and the 
love which affirms its own worth, the worthi- 
ness of its own gift, or righteousness — are our 
conceptions of God to be enhanced, and the 
great doctrines of our creed to be restated. 
And it is a confirmatory evidence of the just- 
ness of the main line of thought, here pursued, 
that in passing by it from natural theology we 
enter, at once, this better way of charity 
through the heart of revealed theology. 

Again, this view of the organic fitness of man 
for the influence of God carries us out of one 
of the old controversies of theological schools. 
For the human will and Divine grace have 
been too much regarded as distinct and sepa- 
rate in their very nature — the human soul as 
completely endowed in its own individuality ; 
and then the problem of faith has been to under- 
stand how the two can ever be united, as grace 
and freedom are made one in conversion and 
the new life. But it is the conclusion of this 
reasoning; that man is born for God, and comes 
fully to himself only as he is conscious of him- 
self as a personal being in relationship to God. 
God and the soul are distinct, yet the soul is 
not a sphere of being complete without God; 



CONCLUSION.— RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 1 69 

as the sun and the earth, are separate — the sun 
above the earth, and glorious, yet also in the 
earth, which feels it to its very centre, and 
which is the earth only as it exists in the sun- 
shine. 

The relation of the view here taken to the 
scientific aspect of nature may be dismissed 
with a single word. We recognize the orderly 
process and evolution of nature, and also, the 
higher moral and spiritual order of which nat- 
ure is the constant type and prophecy. , We 
would neither dishonor God by putting his 
sovereignty in his will, nor profane nature by 
regarding it as the Creator's plaything. Re- 
ligion and science are opposed only when each 
becomes one-sided and mechanical. The pro- 
phet in his vision saw wheels, and also the 
spirit of life within the wheels ; and the vision 
was one. There are wheels, strong, noiseless 
wheels of natural order, and there is a spirit of 
life within the wheels ; whithersoever it goes, 
they go — the w ellordered wheels fulfilling 
their law only as they are moved by the spirit, 
nature remaining nature only as it is God's. 

If this conception of man's godlike nature 
and Divine environment (to express the higher 
in the phrase of the lower science) be true and 
tenable, then we are capable, also, of receiving 
special revelations ; the inspiration of the pro- 
phet is not an anomaly, but in accordance with 
8 



170 THE RELIGIOUS FEELING. 

the nature of man, though, implying a special 
impression of the Divine thought and will; 
and the mystery of the incarnation is the com- 
pletion of that perfect impartation of itself by 
the love of God to the creature, which was 
prepared from the foundation of the world. 
The union of the Divine with the human, 
though transcending thought, is thus seen to 
have been prophesied by man's being, and to 
be made necessary by the very love which is 
God ; so that the person of the Christ is the 
fulfilment of all that we know best of both 
God and man. Given a God who is Spirit 
and who is Love, and man who is a spirit and 
for Love — and the Christ becomes only a ques- 
tion of time. 

These lines of thought, however, which seem 
to be among the lines of progress in theology, 
for our generation, at least, begin where our 
present discussion should come to an end. We 
conclude with the faith that man, though born 
of the dust, is the son of God; and that, 
though living on the earth, he has also a life 
hidden from sense amid things unseen and eter- 
nal. Those things that we love with the purest 
and most perfect love are invisible. The soul, 
itself an unseen presence, opens its affections 
most fully towards unseen realities — to the 
beauty of the spiritual life, to the character in 
the face of a friend, to Him whom having not 



CONCLUSION.— OUR BIRTHRIGHT. lJV 

seen we love ! The hearth of our abiding friend 
ships and immortal joys is in the unseen world. 
There we have our real life — the life of love, in 
its very nature not perishable, but eternal ! It 
is said that the last King of Prussia was one 
day playing with some little children, and he 
asked them to what realm of nature various 
things belonged. He showed them a precious 
stone, and they said, to the mineral kingdom ; 
a rose, and they said, to the vegetable ; a leop- 
ard's skin, and they said, to the animal. " And 
to what kingdom do I belong V he asked, point- 
ing to himself. " To the kingdom of heaven ! " 
said one sweet little voice in prompt reply. 
The child was right; we belong by birthright 
to the kingdom of heaven. 



THE END. 



[A companion volume to Conybeare and Howson's St. Paul.] 

The Life and "Writings of 
Saint John. 

BY THE 

Rev. JAMES M. MACDONALD, D.D., 

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY. 

Edited, with an Introduction, by the 

Very Rev. J. S. HOWSON, D.D., Dean of Chester, 

Joint Author of Conybeare and Howson's St. Paul. 



In one large handsome volume 8vo. Cloth.. Price, $5.00. 
LIST OF FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS, ENGRAVED EXPRESSLY FOR THIS WORK* 



Bust of Augustus. 
Bust of Tiberius Caesar. 
Bethsaida, Site of. 
Jerusalem. 
Cana of Galilee. 
Road from Jerusalem 

to Jericho, 
Jerusalem, Walls of 



Shechem. 

Caesarea Philippi. 

Garden of Gethsemane. 

Bethany. 

Samaria. 

Bust of Caligula. 

Ephesus. 

St. John. 



Bust of Nero. 

Thyatira. 

Philadelphia. 

Laodicea, 

Bust of Julius Caesar. 

Old Tyre, 

Bust of Titus. 

Pergamos. 



Imperium Romanorum Latissime 
Patens. 



Palestine in Time of Christ 
Asia Minor, showing the Seven 
Churches. 



Sardis. 

Site of Capernaum. 

Jacob's Well. 

Tiberias. 

Pool of Siloam. 

Bust of Vespasian. 

Smyrna. 



Patmos. 

St. John's Travels. 



I. 

II. 

III. 

IV. 



VI. 

VII. 

VIII. 

IX. 
X. 

XI. 

XII. 

XIII. 

XIV. 

XV. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 

The Place in History, and character of the period in which the Apostle John appeared. 

Parentage, early life, and natural traits of the Apostle. 

St. John in his early stage of preparation for the Apostleship as a disciple of John th 

Baptist. 
St. John under the training of the Great Master Himself from the beginning of His public 

ministry. 
Preparation for his work from intercourse and instruction in private ; especially from the 

great sacrifice offered by Jesus, as witnessed by the Apostle himself. 
Crowning proof of the Messiahship of Jesus, as witnessed by St. John. 
History of St. John in the Acts of the Apostles. 
Later History from traditionary sources, till his arrival at Ephesus, and banishment !# 

Patmos. 
St. John writes the Apocalypse. Its Date and Design. 
Analysis of the Apocalypse, with brief explanatory Notes. 
Traditionary History of the Apostle continued. 
St. John writes the Fourth Gospel. Date, Design, and Contents. 
Analysis of the Gospel, with brief explanatory Notes. 
Last days and concluding Writings of the Apostle. 
Analysis of the Epistles, with brief explanatory Notes. 



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Edition with all the illustrations.] 



MEMOIR OF 

NORMAN MACLEOD, D.D., 

Minister of Barony Parish, Glasgow ; one of her Majesty^s 
Chaplains, Dean of the Chapel Royal, etc, 

BY HIS BROTHER, REV. DONALD MACLEOD, B.A., 

One of Her Majesty's Chaplains, Editor of 
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